The Oversight

by Charlie Fletcher

  She continued to gore the fire with the poker. Her face was red in the glow from the blaze she had reignited, and her eyes were bright. Mr Sharp reached in and gently removed the poker from her hand.

  “She’s dying,” he said quietly.

  Cook shook her head violently.

  “She’s strong,” she said. “She’s always been strong, even when she was little…”

  “She’s strong, but she’s dying,” said Mr Sharp loudly, as if the only way he could express such a painful thought was to get it out in a burst. “You heard Wayland say it. And losing her hand has somehow accelerated it. Without her heart-stone she dies inside…”

  “… a little more each day…” said a voice from behind them.

  It was a quiet interruption but it silenced them both. They turned as one to see Sara Falk standing in the door behind them. Her lips, usually healthily red against the pale cream of her skin, were now bloodless and white. In contrast, her normally flawless complexion was now bruised with dark half-moons beneath her eyes. She was holding on to the door-handle with her remaining hand, just as an invalid might lean lopsidedly on a cane, one shoulder hunched higher than the other. It gave her the look of a broken marionette, or someone expecting a blow from above. Her stump was bound across her front in a scarlet shawl fastened like a sling. Her smile was so clearly an act of will that it hurt to see it.

  “And then one day she’ll be hollowed out, and whoever she is won’t be her any more,” she continued. “Oh, she’ll walk and talk and may indeed cry and gibber, she may sit in the corner dribbling for decades, but she won’t be Sara Falk ever again. She’ll just be the madness that echoes round the void inside her.”

  “Miss Falk,” said Mr Sharp stepping forward, feeling he had to stop her, had to say something or else himself cry out in wordless pain. She waved him back, as if all this was nothing, as if her bravado came at no cost.

  Her smile was replaced by a grim seriousness as she looked at them both.

  “The truth is that my heart may pump for years. But I, as I, as Sara, will be dead. And if you do not face up to that and act on it, The Oversight itself will fail. You know that.”

  “Sara,” said Cook, pulling out a chair. “Sit down.”

  Sara stepped away from the door and stumbled. Mr Sharp moved fast to catch her and led her by the elbow to the chair. She nodded her thanks, for a moment unable to speak. She wiped her eye and took a deep breath.

  “We are the Last Hand: The Smith, Hodge, you two and I,” she said as if explaining things to a child. “If I cannot be myself the five of us become the four of you, and four is not enough for a Hand.”

  “Stop,” said Mr Sharp. “Please.”

  “No. Let me finish. I have to say this and if you keep fussing over me I shall not be able to,” she said. “Without a Hand, the Wildfire cannot be contained and The Oversight must be disbanded and the remains of you dispersed to the four corners of the wind to search for recruits to form a new Hand. Maybe that has to happen. It has happened before. Or maybe our time is finally come; maybe the darkness bleeds in from the edge of the world and wins. But if it does, it will not be because we were stupid, or weak, or sentimental about the truth. I am dying, dying as a useful member of the Free Company if nothing else, and I must be replaced…”

  “You know that The Smith could not find any willing to join our ranks,” said Mr Sharp.

  “We are tainted by the Disaster,” said Cook. “A generation later and no one forgives us for those who were lost.”

  “Betrayed,” said Mr Sharp.

  “Betrayed and lost,” said Cook.

  “Killed,” said Sara. “Use a plain word for a plain deed. They were betrayed and killed. And no. That is not what they do not forgive us for. They do not forgive us for surviving.”

  She started pushing herself to her feet, waving off the hands reaching out to help.

  “I do not regret surviving,” she continued. “And I feel no guilt. We survived through luck. That is all. Fate dealt us better cards than our friends and forebears, and in their memory I will play them as well as I can.”

  She stood straight and stretched, scowling at the effort it took. A tear had leaked from one eye, and she reached for it with her stump, forgetting she had no fingers there to brush it away quickly and hide it. She stopped and used the other hand. It was an uncharacteristically clumsy gesture, her body’s memory of itself fooling her conscious knowledge of her injury. Mr Sharp winced at it.

  “Why the loss of a hand should make all my bones ache I do not know,” she said through a tight smile. “I am going to lie down for a while.”

  “Let me help,” said Mr Sharp.

  “No,” she said. “I do not need help moving around my own house. Not yet.”

  They let her sway unaided to the backstairs, the ones down which she had once fallen running away from a Green Man who had stepped out of a child’s nightmare, and silently watched her hoist herself back up towards her bedroom by the banisters, her back stiff with the effort of not making it look hard.

  When she had gone, Cook took the bottle from behind the spoons, placed two glasses on the deal table and poured them both a jolt of amber liquid. She drank hers in one, grimacing at the warm burn as it went down her throat. Mr Sharp drank half of his and looked at the remnant as if he expected to see an answer to his dilemma swimming in the depths.

  “More?” asked Cook, pointing the bottle at him.

  “No, thank you,” he said. “I’m still assessing the damage of that last mouthful. What was it?”

  “Medicinal waters,” she said. “Waters of life.”

  “Whisky,” he scowled, and finished his dram with a decisive movement. “No wonder so many Scots come south to escape it. Thank you.”

  He handed back the glass.

  “I have never seen her cry before,” he said.

  “She is flesh and blood,” she said.

  “I do know that, my dear Cook, I assure you.”

  “And yet…?” she said, watching the tight stretch of his coat across his shoulders.

  “And yet. I do not choose to see her… dwindle in this excess of distress,” he said. “I will not see her diminished so in her own eyes. I will not… allow it.”

  “She wants you to find a replacement for her. She wants you to keep The Oversight alive.”

  “We agree on the need to protect The Oversight. Where we disagree is on method.”

  “We need another member, Mr Sharp. For the Hand. We need many more members for other Hands. But we must at least have the Last Hand intact,” she said.

  “Not if Sara Falk is healed,” he said. “Then the Last Hand will survive and we can build on that.”

  “Her hand and ring are gone,” she said.

  “Then I shall find them.”

  Her eyes rolled to the ceiling, where there happened to be a cutlass hanging from a hook next to a milk pan. She looked as if she wanted to grab it and start flailing around with it in frustration: instead, she stabbed a blunt finger at him.

  “In this of all moments, when reality needs to be faced, you the ever careful, the ever cautious choose to be fanciful and quixotic! It is not enough that Hodge seems consumed by a death-wish, out in all weathers, hunting this breath-stealer he has become obsessed with, and so all but lost to us as a useful member of The Oversight! Sara’s poor hand is lost in the mirrors. It could be anywhere in the world where two mirrors face each other. It could be in Manchester or Munich or Macau! You’d have an easier time finding a needle in a thousand haystacks.”

  “Finding a needle in a thousand haystacks is not impossible. It is merely very, very hard,” he said with a thoroughly provoking display of calmness under fire.

  “And time-consuming!” she roared, slamming the palm of her hand onto the scrubbed pine with enough force to make the glasses jump in the air and fall on their sides. Mr Sharp caught one as it went over the edge.

  “And while I know you think you can do very, very hard things, Mr
Sharp, even you cannot make more time!”

  He placed the glass he had caught carefully back on the table and straightened.

  “I am sworn to protect her. I swore that before I was admitted into the Free Company. I cannot do otherwise. If I break my honour to save the Hand, then I am as useless to it as if I were an enemy. I would be creating a false Hand, with rot at its core. And that would lead to another Disaster, worse than the one that nearly destroyed us last time. I will go into the mirrors.”

  She shook her head.

  “You will die in the mirrors.”

  He shrugged.

  “You must all follow The Smith’s plan and bury the Wildfire and the treasures beneath the Thames. And I can do nothing other than what I must, old friend. If I am not true as my blade is true, I am nothing. Might as well be a Sluagh…”

  CHAPTER 50

  NA-BARNO’S HAND REVEALED

  The crowds had melted away, and the showmen had shut up their stalls for the night. Those who had not gone to bed, wearied at the long day they had passed entertaining the public and lightening their pockets and purses, sat around camp-fires passing bottles between them and amusing themselves by telling old stories and new lies to each other.

  Na-Barno Eagle did not join any of these fire-lit pools of conviviality. He sat in the cramped quarters of his own cart, warmed by the meagre glow from the small travelling stove in the corner. He was staring out of the door at the Temple of Magic. Georgiana sat on the narrow bed holding the moneybox with the day’s takings on her lap. She watched him turning the bottle in his hand as he stared murderously at the tent which hid the treacherously broken automaton that had so nearly spoiled his show and damaged his reputation.

  “Father—” she began.

  “No,” he said decisively. “No, my angel, it’s no good. It’s broken. The damned mechanism is broken. I was told it was robust, by God I was, but it is not robust. It is skittish and over-delicate and wholly unsuitable for transportation. I was sold it in the clear understanding that it would exceed the abilities of the damned imposter Anderson’s automaton, but all I have beggared myself to acquire is a frozen piece of useless clockwork which is wilfully unmoving. I have been betrayed yet again.”

  “The people enjoyed my mind-reading, Father,” said Georgiana. “And the communication with the spirits went off very prettily…”

  “You seek to ease the pain of disappointment in my heart, dear child, but there is only one kind of spirit that can give me solace and that is within this bottle,” he said, holding up the green flask. “And it will only numb me for the night. Tomorrow I shall wake and still be beset by all my enemies and betrayers. And I will still have the prospect of facing the braggart Anderson and being grossly humiliated in public for what will no doubt be the last and fatal time, for who could endure such public ignominy and still perform? And if I do not perform we shall not eat, and if we do not eat, well, it is sure that we will waste away and die…”

  He threw himself back in his chair and swigged a great mouthful of tincture, eyes wet with self-pity.

  “But, Father,” said Georgiana, smiling brightly. “All is not lost. What need we with an automaton when I can perform our mind-reading? For am I not more pleasing to look at than any old wooden effigy? Do I not have vivid charm and a bright and compelling presence? All is not lost!”

  “Our mind-reading?” said Eagle, lip curling bitterly. “Our mind-reading is a trick that happily bedazzles and amazes dull rustic minds who exercise their thinking capacity little more than watching one foot follow the other behind a plough. Anderson spends his days thinking and concocting illusions of his own. His mind is not dull. It is like a scimitar! It is sharper than a Turk’s razor. He is the very devil incarnate, but he is no fool!”

  “But you are clever too, Father, as am I!” Georgiana cried. “We can polish and extend my mind-reading…”

  His hand snapped out and grabbed her wrist. She gasped at the unexpected fierceness of his grasp.

  “Your mind-reading?” he spat. “What makes you think it is yours? It was your mother’s first, and before that…”

  He looked away.

  “Father?” she said.

  “Before that it was someone else’s.”

  “Whose?” she said.

  He exhaled slowly.

  “When I rescued your dear dead mother from her previous life of bondage and abuse, she did not come empty-handed.”

  “But whose trick was it?” said Georgiana, her eyes bright.

  “It was… some other magician. She was his assistant. Her family travelled the same circuit as he did, and when his wife became dropsical, he arranged for your mother to assist him in her stead for a season.”

  “So…” began Georgiana.

  “So it is a known routine amongst the fraternity. So imagine if we were to have done the act tonight in front of Anderson, as I shall have to face him in two weeks’ time. When the flats and yokels marvelled so that you knew the clod had lost his scythe, up he would have jumped and with his look of bumptious conceit he would have cried out to the crowd, ‘Stop! Let me show that the only true illusion here is that Eagle and his daughter have any powers, for this is but a cheap and easy trick to pull off! When you were penned in the passage muttering to one another, you were being listened to! And you, sir, did you not perhaps mention a scythe?’ And when the clod concurs, someone still favourably disposed to us might pipe up quickly, ‘But she can still not have known who the talker was!’ and then he will stand even taller, positively about to burst with self-satisfaction and explain our code: ‘Did the imposter Eagle not say, “Great Moor, so can you tell him exactly what he has lost?” ’ he will boom, and they will nod and agree, and then he will say, ‘Observe the first letters in the phrase following “Great Moor”–“so can you tell him exactly”: “so” is S, “can” is C, “you” is Y, “tell” is T, “him” is H, “exactly” is E, spelling what word?’ And then he will have them in the palm of his hands and they will roar the answer ‘SCYTHE’ and we will be exposed and objects of ridicule. Ridicule I say, and I will brook no man laughing at me!”

  He threw himself back in his seat with such a velocity of despair that it cracked ominously as he stared at the ceiling of his wagon.

  “Nor I, Father,” said Georgiana, sitting down, her face pale. “Nor I.”

  He dropped his eyes and found hers, and for a long moment they both stared at each other as if they had noticed something for the first time. Eagle broke the gaze and looked away first.

  “So we are to be ruined?” said Georgiana. “You accepted this duel with Anderson thinking you had the better weapon, and now know that to be false.”

  He nodded and took another murderous swig from his bottle.

  “Well,” she said, shaking the moneybox. “We have tonight’s money so we may eat a while longer. And where there’s life, there’s always hope.”

  “And where there’s hope, there’s always a great candle-snuffer hovering over it ready to extinguish it just as it flares brightest,” he sighed.

  Georgiana slapped him.

  He was so shocked that he froze completely, not even having the wit to resist, and she leant in and took the green flask from his hands. “You struck me,” he said, his lip quivering like a child’s.

  “No, Father. You were befuddled,” she said. “I struck the fuddle, not the man. If we are to avoid ruin, we must be clear-headed.”

  “I do not wish to be clear-headed,” he sobbed.

  “And I will not have you fuddled,” she said, keeping the bottle out of reach. “You do not talk when the bottle is on you, and you do not answer anything.”

  “I am answering for everything,” he wept. “I am answering for my life with my life.”

  “And mine?” she asked. “Must I answer for your life too?”

  “No, child,” he whispered hoarsely. “No, you should be spared that unnatural punishment at least.”

  The fire crackled weakly and for a while was th
e only sound in the narrow space as they both contemplated their joint and separate futures.

  “What else have you not told me?” she said.

  “About your mother?” he asked. “About Anderson?”

  “That’s dead news and the past won’t help us,” she said. “What have you found?”

  “What, my child?”

  “You have found something you have not told me about. I have heard you talking to it. I have heard you weep and call it our salvation. If it is salvation, I should like to see it,” she said.

  He shook his head wildly.

  “I cannot tell you. I must not. I cannot—”

  “Why?”

  “Because… because it is something I do not understand. I found it on the night my beautiful mirror was broken. I found it scuttling blindly across the floor.”

  “It,” she said. “It is an animal?”

  “No,” he said, his mouth opening and shutting as if he were a frog and the words he could not find were flies he was trying to pluck out of the air.

  “What is it?”

  Eagle shook his head and stood abruptly. He rubbed his face and grimaced.

  “I call myself a magician…” he began.

  “A wizard,” she said. “A great wizard.”

  He nodded appreciatively.

  “But you, my beautiful child, know I am merely a conjurer. An illusionist.”

  “Merely the best in the country,” she said.

  He smiled weakly and felt his cheek where she had slapped him.

  “You are a loyal girl, even when you strike your own flesh and blood.”

  “It was necessary,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “I have travelled the length and breadth of this island for two decades, and I have seen things. More than seen: I have sometimes felt things, sensed them.”

  “Things?” she said.

  “An edge. A pit. A darkness. A shadow,” he said.

  She looked deep into his wet eyes.

  “I think you are still befuddled.”

  He shook his head again, and then, as if the effort of talking and standing at the same time were suddenly too much for him, he sat back down and looked at his boots.