The Oversight

by Charlie Fletcher

  “Wake up, sleepy-head,” he said. “We’re here.”

  “Where?” she said, still groggy and frustratingly not very refreshed despite the length and depth of her slumbers.

  He pulled the tarpaulin back to reveal a sooty pigeon-torn sky hemmed in by masts, cranes and davits.

  “Regent’s Basin,” he said with a proprietorial air. “And that over there’s the Thames.” He swept his arm and pointed towards the unmistakable silhouette of the Tower of London poking above the rooftops.

  “And Wellclose Square’s about halfway between us and the Tower. How’s that for service?”

  She scrambled upright and took the bundled hand from its place beneath the hay-stuffed flour-sack Mrs Stonex had given her as a pillow.

  “Let’s go,” she said. “Right now. Fast as we can.”

  They thanked the Stonexes, who bid them as easy a farewell as they had given them a welcome, and undertook to send a message back up the line of the canal to the effect that they had both arrived in London without harm.

  “Though in my experience,” said Mrs Stonex, casting a jaundiced eye at her husband, “staying out of trouble on the way to London’s not half as difficult for some as staying out of trouble once you’re there.”

  The basin was so full and busy that their barge had had to moor next to another barge and not the dock itself, so Charlie and Lucy clambered over it and found their way ashore.

  At this point, the assault on her senses which Lucy had anticipated began in earnest. Charlie evidently took her at her word and went as fast as he could so that she had to run to keep up with him as they buffeted past the bargees, stevedores and traders thronging the dockside. They kicked up flurries of pigeons pecking at spilt grain; they dodged handcarts and wagons, and stutter-stepped past men staggering beneath loads that looked as if they would have killed a horse.

  The smells and noises all around them added to the sense she had of having been pitched pell-mell into a battle instead of a civilised city, quite as if she had woken to find herself in one of the great conflicts Barnaby Pyefinch described with his dioramas at the fairs. Faces, mouths, boots, knees and above all eyes were everywhere, blurring past her as she ran behind Charlie, taking care not to lose sight of his long coat or the flash of the tacks in the soles of his boots. The one thing she was thankful for was that people only seemed to notice them if they bumped or jostled against them: as long as they jinked and dodged their way without collisions, she and Charlie were as anonymous and unnoticed as the pigeons.

  At least they seemed to be.

  It took less than ten minutes for them to get to the quieter backstreet leading to Wellclose Square, and as soon as Charlie pointed out the single tall smoke-stack of the sugar refinery and the thin steeple of the church just beyond, she slowed.

  It was Charlie’s stopping and turning back to see what was up that caught the eye of the burly young man with no neck who was talking to someone inside a black carriage pulled up diagonally across from the Safe House. Though the burly young man had no neck to speak of, and so wore his head hunched down into the hump of muscle straining against the shoulders of his top-coat, he did have very sharp eyes, and he caught sight of the two because Charlie’s sudden halting and reversal of movement broke the pattern and flow of a neighbourhood that he was wholly and unconsciously attuned to.

  It was great bad luck for Lucy that the watcher was called Sherehog Templebane, and that he was talking to his father inside the coach.

  “You are not attending me!” said Issachar testily. “I was just…”

  “Hold up,” said Sherehog, waving his father down in a gesture only he and perhaps Vintry, as the two oldest “sons”, would dare attempt. “Ain’t that the girl we put the pitch-plaster gag on?”

  Issachar bit off the rebuke with which he had been about to savage Sherehog for his impudence and leant forward, squinting into the light.

  “What is it?” said Charlie.

  “I don’t know how to do this,” said Lucy, stopped dead outside a shop selling alarmingly lifelike glass eyes and less convincing false legs. “She might be dead. People die when their arms are cut off.”

  “And they also live,” said Charlie.

  “But if she’s dead it’s my fault,” said Lucy. “The stone ring, the glass one gives her strength. I’ve got my own special bit of glass. I know how important it is. And I sort of stole that too, her one I mean. I mean I was taken to the house and I don’t know quite how that happened, but they were kind to me, and I stole from them. And I don’t know how to explain that to them because I don’t know how I did that or why I tried it…”

  “But she can’t be dead, otherwise how could the hand be alive?” said Charlie. “We talked about this. She’s communicating with the hand, ain’t she?”

  She nodded. She felt sick.

  This was not a new conversation. They’d discussed this on the barge several times as they watched the countryside slip slowly past them. Lucy wished she were back on that simpler and more peaceful journey where decisions only had to be discussed, not acted on.

  “We could always put it on the doorstep, ring the bell and run away,” said Charlie with a grin.

  “Be serious,” she said. “This is hard.”

  He nodded and looked at the fog creeping into the square.

  “You know the difference between you and Georgie Eagle?” he said.

  She could think of a long list of answers, but she just looked at him.

  “She’d do the easy thing, the thing that was best for her. In fact she wouldn’t be having this conversation. She wouldn’t be here. So why don’t you think what she would do, and then do the opposite.”

  Lucy thought about it and then nodded decisively.

  “Right. I can do that,” she said. “Show me the house.”

  “I thought you’d been there before,” he said.

  “I was in a sack.”

  The Safe House looked blank and empty. The windows were shuttered and when they rang the doorbell the only sound was a distant jangle which died away to an echo, and then… nothing. No sound of feet approaching, no inner doors opening and closing, no movement of any kind.

  “Ring it again,” said Charlie after a couple of minutes had trickled past.

  “There’s no one in,” she said, lead in her voice. This had been a stupid idea. And what was stupider was that she didn’t know what to do if no one came to the door. So she pulled the handle again and listened to the noise startle into brassy life and then die once more.

  “We can just sit here and wait,” said Charlie. “Be fine unless it rains.”

  Lucy bit her lip and clutched Sara’s hand to her chest as she looked at the worn stone around the door. It was an old house. And that stone wall looked just like the kind she spent her life avoiding touching for fear that the past locked inside it would reach back and bite at her. A house like this, with all the strange comings and goings it must have witnessed, was surely bursting with traumatic memories just hunched in the stones, waiting to spring back to life. She remembered Sara searching through her glove box, trying to find some for her to wear. No wonder she wore long black gloves herself.

  Because they were looking up at the front of the house, searching for movement, they missed the sinister coach rolling slowly up to the gate behind them.

  Three floors above there was someone in. And though it was recognisably Sara Falk, she herself was so weak and changed that she did not know who she was as the insistent bells woke her for a second time. She lay on the bed, as white and lifeless as the pillows around her.

  “No,” she said, and a tear runnelled out of her eye, unbidden and unnoticed. “No. No one home.”

  And she closed her eyes and sought the oblivion of sleep again.

  Lucy was looking at the stone around the door, but she was thinking more about gloves when the voice from the street interrupted her.

  “There’s nobody in,” it said. “Sadly. They have gone.”

  She
turned and for a moment could not see who had spoken. Then she realised that the door to the coach was open and the voice came from the darkness within.

  “Perhaps I can help?” said the voice.

  “We’re fine,” said Charlie sharply. “Thank you.”

  Lucy knew they were suddenly not fine at all, and she knew that Charlie sensed it too, because he had instinctively stepped in front of her.

  Since looking for the right direction to run in was second nature to her, she automatically checked the possible ways to flee, and in so doing discovered Sherehog leaning innocently against the side-gate. They would just have to run around the back of the house and hope there was a way out there…

  “I was not talking to you, young man,” said the voice, honey over gravel. “I was talking to dear Miss Harker.”

  The words came out of nowhere and hooked her guts with such a strong and unexpected tug that she felt her heart bump up into her throat. So deep a sense of danger hit her that her stomach spasmed and turned to water. She clenched her teeth, controlling the terror rising in her gullet.

  Charlie turned and looked at her.

  “I don’t know who that man is,” she said very quietly, her pulse pounding.

  “Then we’re in trouble,” he said.

  Lucy knew that. But she also knew the worst of it was what she would now have to do. The man behind the voice knew her name. Which meant he knew other things. Things she needed to know.

  “I have holes in my memory,” she said.

  Charlie nodded slowly as if he understood. Then he lifted his coat and showed her the blunderbuss hanging by its strap and the knife at his belt. Something about the cold way he raised an eyebrow reminded her of the man dressed in midnight blue who had cut her free of the sack in this very building.

  She shook her head.

  “I have to go,” she said. “I have to.”

  She gave him Sara’s hand and then leant in and, whilst appearing to kiss him goodbye, whispered something in his ear. Then she walked off the steps and peered into the carriage.

  “How do you know my name, sir?” she said.

  “What is the boy doing?” rasped the voice from within the dark carriage, frighteningly closer now that Lucy had walked down the front steps to stand in the gateway.

  Charlie had his back to them, doing what she whispered in his ear: peeling the glove from Sara’s hand so he could place it on the stone wall of the house. He was finding it hard to do, his fingers fumbling with the buttons and tight leather. He hoped that whatever piece of the past bit out would be felt by Sara wherever she was, and that she would recognise the house and realise her hand must be there.

  Lucy prayed that if Sara was close she would return before it was too late because the pull of the dark voice and all the holes it promised to fill in her memory was very, very strong.

  Charlie gave up on the buttons and stuck the tip of his knife under the leather and ripped outwards, revealing the palm of the hand.

  He slapped it to the wall.

  Sara Falk woke with a convulsive jerk, her knees jack-knifing towards her head as the past hit her in jagged slices as she glinted—

  Wellclose Square

  a minute ago

  a girl

  that girl

  Lucy

  yanks the bell

  a young man turns, coat flaring

  a blunderbuss hanging on a strap visible for a moment

  “We can just sit here and wait,” he says.

  kind eyes.

  Then a time jerk and the gate is blocked by a coach.

  A voice comes out.

  gravel and honey

  “There’s nobody in. Sadly. They have gone.”

  Lucy turns

  time jerks

  “I was talking to dear Miss Harker.”

  Lucy’s face drains of colour

  Sara felt the icy tug in the girl’s guts as if in her own and tumbled out of her bed, retching. She hung over the Kashgai rug and panted, thin bile ribboning onto the brightly coloured wool below.

  She had never felt this urgency.

  She had never felt this weak.

  She crawled and stumbled to her feet, tipping a chair onto the floor as she grabbed it to support herself.

  She did not have the strength to walk down the stairs.

  She fell back to her knees and dragged herself to the edge of the steps.

  She remembered The Smith looking into her eyes, telling her it was all over.

  There is strength.

  And when there is no strength—

  —there is gravity.

  She grunted with the effort as she yanked awkwardly forward over the tipping point at the top of the steep slope of the stairs and tumbled herself downwards.

  Lucy had to control her terror and step closer to the carriage to keep blocking the view of Charlie. The terror felt like vertigo because she was teetering on a razor’s edge between the fear of asking the questions and the fear of what the answers might be. But she knew the even bigger fear was never knowing.

  “Who are you?” she said, inching closer.

  Something emerged from the gloom: a pale, pillowy hand holding what she first thought was a nut, but then saw was a stone. Or half a stone, mottled green and red.

  “I am the man who has something you have lost, I think, and if you come in here, my dear, I can return it to you and take you back to the safety and riches you are heir to. I can return you–”

  And at this point Issachar leant further forward so that his great slack-jowled face seemed for a moment to swim out of the gloom as a disembodied thing, before she saw the dark lawyer’s clothes beneath. He smiled benignly at her.

  “–I can return you, I say, and you would do me a great honour by allowing me so to do, to the very bosom of your warm and loving family.”

  She hesitated, trying to control the leaping sensations in her ribcage, trying to think straight.

  “Look,” he smiled. “Take it and look. It is the other half of your ring. Only a friend would have been vouchsafed it.”

  She reached for it and saw the animal engraved on it. Her fingers closed on it and in that moment Templebane’s hand snaked out and grabbed her wrist, tugging her into the black maw of the carriage.

  She tried to throw herself backwards, but he was strong and all she managed to do was brace herself against the door-frame with her feet and one free hand. She could tell this was a trial of strength she would not win, for if she released a hand or a foot to try and lash out at him, all her slim advantage would be lost in an instant and she would be tumbled inside the carriage with him, a fate she suddenly was terrified of.

  “Sherehog!” he shouted. “Get her in and let’s be away!”

  As Sherehog lunged across the pavement the front door of the Safe House wrenched open with a bang.

  “LET HER GO!”

  Sara Falk hung in the doorway with one hand on the jamb, the stump hanging loose on the other side of her, white hair wild around her head, nightdress torn and whipping in the breeze, her knees and elbows grazed raw from her headlong tumbling crawl down the three flights of stairs.

  Her voice was ragged, her body looked broken with exhaustion but her eyes were blazing.

  Templebane’s chuckle was deep and insulting as it rolled across the pavement and up the steps of the house.

  “Or what, Miss Falk? Or what exactly?”

  Lucy felt no let up in his strength, and her muscles were screaming with the pain of resisting him. She craned her head back and saw with horror the wreck of Sara.

  “I’m sorry,” she choked.

  “Sherehog!” shouted Templebane. “Get the bitch in!”

  Sara looked at Charlie. He was holding her lost hand.

  “Give me that,” she said.

  He held it out. She swayed dangerously as she let go of the door and took it, and so he grabbed her and kept her on her feet.

  She looked at the hand. At the mirror on its stump. At the mirror on her
own arm.

  And then she just touched one to the other.

  There was a click and a great jolt which Charlie felt go through her like an electric shock. She gasped in a great paroxysm of surprise and release.

  Then he felt her straighten and push him away.

  “Give me that too,” she said in a wholly new voice, pointing to the blunderbuss under his coat.

  Her face looked different. It was younger, more alive–and grim as cold death itself.

  Without ceremony she yanked it so that the strap broke off his shoulder, and strode down the steps straight towards the carriage, blunderbuss aimed right at Templebane.

  “Sherehog!” shouted Issachar, scrabbling a pair of smoked-glass spectacles out of his pocket with his free hand, and jamming them on his nose. “She won’t fire; she’ll hit the girl!”

  Sherehog stepped in Sara’s way and made the mistake of hesitating.

  “Just a—” he began.

  She didn’t break step, just reversed the gun so fast that one second he was staring down its flared barrel, the next he caught the brass-bound stock under his chin and went down like a poleaxed steer.

  Sara stepped right over him and pointed the gun past Lucy, into the carriage.

  “Now I won’t hit her, except with bits of you. And that’ll wash off.”

  Templebane stared at her.

  “Let her go,” she said.

  “You do not know who she is,” he sneered. “You do not even—”

  She reversed the gun again with eye-defying speed and broke his arm with a brutal jab of the butt-plate.

  He gasped and yelped in shock. Lucy felt his hand release her.

  She stumbled backwards onto the pavement.

  “In the house with the boy, now,” said Sara without breaking eye contact with Templebane’s shocked and hate-filled eyes.

  “You—” he began.

  “I don’t know if Lucy is her real name. But I do know who she is. She is one of us. Not one of you, Mr Issachar or Mr Zebulon Templebane, for that is who you are, is it not? Not one of you.” And she cocked the blunderbuss and aimed it at him, shaking with barely controlled fury.