From the Deep of the Dark j-6

by Stephen Hunt

  Dick headed off in the opposite direction from the hawker and then doubled back on his tracks using the street behind the townhouses, following the rear of the crescent around to where he could catch up with the honourable Rufus Symons. As Dick suspected, once he’d left the cab halt, the fake hawker had wasted no time leaving the scene of his own watch. Symons hadn’t been brave enough to trail the exiting mark, not with his fellow rebel being followed by the secret police — or attempt to warn him, for that matter, that the authorities were following his tracks. But perhaps that merely showed a measure of sensible caution. They were rare creatures, now, royalists — supplanted by the lords’ commercial for centuries, hunted down and vilified with all the sins of the Jackelian nation still lumped upon their heads. You couldn’t blame Symons for wanting to preserve his own skin, whatever his motive for mounting a surveillance alongside the secret police.

  Dick hung back from the rebel, not wanting to get too close, the weight of the stolen candlesticks still swinging heavy inside his coat. When he had a moment, Dick changed the coat’s pattern by reversing the garment, warm brown fur on the outside — the kind of garment that might be worn by one of the repair crew of patchers that climbed the city’s towers. He changed his gait, too, a confident strut to match the expandable low-crowned John Gloater top-hat that was now covering his silver hair. There was no longer much of the hansom cab driver about Dick.

  It wasn’t difficult to stay out of the rebel’s sight, following behind him and masked by the falling snow at night, the gaps between each gas lamp filled with shifting mists and vapours. It got easier still, once the rich residential district fell behind, pressing towards the heart of the city, where Middlesteel’s streets still had patrons falling out of drinking houses and Jackelians whistling down cabs and climbing into private coaches as they exited theatres and gambling dens. Symons was spry on his feet, doing everything correctly to check if he was being followed. All the little halts and checks, the sudden changes of direction; stopping by the harp maker’s window to snatch a quick look behind him in the reflection of the glass panes. Ducking through the tavern crowd in the Crooked Chimney and out through the drinking house’s back entrance, into the side street where Dick was already waiting. But this was bread and butter to Dick. If he had an art, this was it. Wherever Symons looked, Dick Tull wasn’t, all the way underground to the atmospheric line at Guardian Lenthall station, and then they were both just part of the throng crowding its way onto the platform. When the next capsule shunted through the rubber airlock, Dick waited for the rebel to board, spotting the heap of the hawker’s jacket shrugged off on the platform and being trampled underfoot. Then the capsule’s brass doors swung shut, a slight hiss as its airtight integrity was proved to the instruments on board, before being shunted through the rubber curtain and into the pneumatic tubes, the pressure differential building up until they were hurtling through the airless tunnels like a bullet. There was Symons, now wearing the black jacket of the middling sort of clerk who inhabited the towers of the capital’s counting houses, no sign of his hawker’s tray, his narrow cheeks having acquired a thin pair of spectacles to perch on the end of his nose.

  Rufus Symons must have been comfortable that he wasn’t being followed — there were no false exits by the door of the atmospheric capsule as it pulled into the concourses of other stations, no sudden step backs into the carriage as if he had changed his mind about his destination at the last minute. When the rebel did exit, there were enough people moving on and off the concourse that Dick’s own exit didn’t appear contrived.

  Just a tired patcher returning home, but where was home? The answer to that appeared to be at the foot of one of the tall hills that surrounded the capital, the city thinning out into a cluster of village-like lanes at its outskirts, a couple of cobbled streets surrounded by shops and homes climbing upwards on a steep incline.

  I’ve been here before. On the business of the board, too. When was it?

  The feeling of recollection grew stronger as Dick followed Symons up the hill. There were large houses at the top of the hill, he recalled, with their own grounds. Not as expensive as Lord Chant’s, but then this district was too near the outskirts of the city to begin to be considered fashionable. A place for independent thinkers, the kind of person who didn’t care what others thought of them, who valued the view over the pneumatic towers at the capital’s heart, haze rising into the sky from the heated water flowing through their rubberized skins. The sort of soul who had no use for society invites and could see poetry in the venting steam from the mills below curling into the darkening sky, obscuring the collision lamps of airships passing through heaven’s command.

  This is where I’d end up if I only had the money for it. If only I could go back in time and take my chances again. A nice clean ward. No thieves rattling my skylight, waking me up in the small hours, sending me reaching for the pistol under my pillow. No drunken singing in the middle of the night from gangs of full-up-to-the-knocker louts falling out of alehouses.

  There was a village green at the top of the hill, a duck pond frozen enough that a couple of birds were skating over its surface, using the light spilling out from the crescent of houses and cottages on the other side to try to find a break and a drink of water. Dick’s quarry was heading towards an arched opening in a brick wall on the other side of pond, the wall’s shadow just taller than a man’s height, foliage from an orchard rising up beyond the bricks, and behind that, a single large tower crowned with an illuminated clock face.

  Dick didn’t need to see the residence’s name engraved in the brass plate by the entrance, just the sight of the folly rising like a landlocked lighthouse enough to shake the memory of his single visit here years before. Tock House. The State Protection Board knew well the true identity of the man who lived behind these comfortable walls; after all, they had been using it to blackmail him into working for the secret police for long enough. Commodore Jared Black. A royalist who had changed his identity so many times in his life on the run, it was a wonder he still knew who he was. And when he’d finally stopped running, the board had eventually caught up with him and sunk its claws in his tired old flesh. They had turned him and used him to their own ends.

  You’re meant to be our asset, Blacky, you old rascal. You had better not be playing both sides of the field. Backsliding with your old rebel friends.

  Here was information worth having. But he’d have to tread softly. The commodore was as sly as a fox, and there were always wheels within wheels where he was involved. He might act like a blustering old sea dog, but the man was deadly with a sabre and cunning enough to have survived everything fate and the dangerous, unasked for duties of the board had thrown at him. There were those who played in the great game as masters, and old Blacky was one of them. Double agent, triple? Or more likely only ever on his own side? Dick’d have to play this one right carefully with the brass-buttoned officers back in the board — there were those who wouldn’t take kindly to having one of their prize chickens plucked bare by a lowly officer of Dick Tull’s standing.

  Dick patted the side-pocket of his coat where the comforting weight of the two stolen silver candles lay, and then he smiled. I’ll be back for you, Blacky. See if I can’t wipe that smug smile off of your wine-stained lips. Back to squeeze you for the truth of what you, Symons, and all your royalist friends scampering about the capital are up to. You’ve just become my ace card, you sod, and I’m keeping you tucked up my sleeve.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘As you can see,’ said Charlotte, her husky voice cutting across the assemblage, ‘there is nothing tucked up my sleeves.’

  Not that the mostly male audience was interested in looking up her decorated sleeves when she had left so much else on show, her powder-blue dress shockingly low cut for high society’s current standards; fanning delicately over the sides of the purple crinoline skirt riding her willowy hips.

  Distraction, it was all about distraction. Especially for the spon
sors of this coming-out ball, who would hopefully never piece together Charlotte Shades’ true involvement with what would really be coming out this night — and not just the dull debutante daughters of a mob of fat mill owners and merchant lords.

  ‘But-’ she continued, gesturing theatrically towards the member of the audience plucked up to the stage, ‘-while there is nothing up my sleeve, might there not be something in your pocket?’

  There was a collective gasp of astonishment from the audience as the man on stage tugged his gold pocket watch out of his pocket.

  ‘It still works,’ Charlotte reassured him. After having seen it wrapped in her handkerchief and smashed to pieces he looked at it doubtfully dangling from its expensive chain. ‘But, alas, I couldn’t fix it from being a minute slow. My skills in the sorcerer’s arts do not extend to matters horological.’

  ‘Upon my life,’ huffed the man. ‘It still works!’

  Charlotte bowed as she took the round of applause, trying to ignore the shouts for extra acts of hypnotism. That was the trouble with owning a flashy stage name such as Charlotte Shades, Mistress of Mesmerism. It was catchy enough to act as a lure for invites into the grand mansions of the nobility (which proved lucrative in so many ways). But her clients always wanted to see tricks of hypnotism, and she was loath to reveal just how well she could perform her artifice. Nothing to make you think too hard about me. Distraction, it’s all about distraction. Just a performing curiosity, capering about the stage for your entertainment, my lords.

  She addressed the audience. ‘I have found it advantageous to always leave gentlemen requesting an extra encore. Besides, I fear my account at Lords Bank may be cancelled if its chief cashier is once more made to believe he is a humble lamp lighter, and the notes in his wallet the wicks he must ignite.’

  Hoots of good-natured laughter echoed around the chamber.

  ‘Away. Away, I have detained you from your daughters and your better halves for long enough. And even the Mistress of Mesmerism does not possess the magic to transform a wife’s ire into happiness if you miss the start of the debutantes’ procession tonight.’

  And I need to away too, before tonight’s patron, his Excellency the Duke Commercial Edwin, discovers some disreputable rogue has transformed his prized private gallery into an empty strong room with a blank wall.

  It was as the crowd broke up and began to disperse back to the mansion’s ballroom that she caught sight of the man. It wasn’t just that he was out of place here, runaday cloth on a bland suit without the assured stance of the wealthy and powerful — but his face was a policeman’s face. They all had that stare, unflinching and jaded — a stare that had seen it all and kept on watching until it finally got tired of judging. A little island of self-awareness fixed in this aristocratic surf of egos and vanities, lonely among the preening popinjays floating around him.

  Haven’t I been careful enough tonight? What’s he doing here, in the audience? Not a coincidence, not the way he’s watching me. Someone hired by one of the many patrons who’d woken up in the morning to find their jewel boxes broken open and their safes emptied? Ham Yard, or a consulting detective specialising in private resolutions? She didn’t need to discover what he was. Like all good conjurers, Charlotte knew when it was time to disappear.

  Jumping down from the stage, Charlotte allowed herself to believe she had lost him, filtering through the flow of departing guests, but someone came up behind her and shoved her arm behind her back so roughly it made the jab of the pistol in her ribs redundant. She tried to protest, and in doing so caught a glimpse of her captor. Not the policeman after all, someone else… a short broken-nosed bruiser with the kind of face only a mother could love. Charlotte was frog-marched out of the chamber she’d been performing in, through a small wooden door and into a large private library with a hillside view down to a river running through a valley. Shutting the library door behind him came the simply dressed gentleman with a policeman’s gaze, a velvet cape lined spilled blood-red flashing behind him as he locked the door with a clack.

  Charlotte smiled her best innocent smile. If she could just get the two of them standing together… but broken nose was a shadow behind her, the pistol in his hand. ‘I didn’t know his Excellency the duke commercial operated a reading group, or that you were so desperate for new blood that you have to abduct his guests.’

  ‘I prefer the newssheets to novels,’ smiled the gentleman, very little warmth on his thin lips. He perched himself comfortably on the edge of a large mahogany reading table, both hands clutching a wooden cane. ‘Fact is so much more informing than fiction. How do you think the headlines will read tomorrow, Damson Shades? Does the Mistress of Mesmerism also dabble in the art of precognition — is there, perhaps, a crystal ball among the possessions of your conjurer’s chest?’

  ‘Why sir, if I had the gift of future sight, I’d be following the racing season with wager slips in my pocket, not performing for the debutante season.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, Damson Shades. I think there is profit enough in performing under the duke’s roof. Did you know he has a painting in his private collection, Turn Back to Yesterday, worth its weight in gold? I find Walter Snagsby’s works a little chocolate-box for my tastes. All those bucolic scenes of village fields and cows and milkmaids.’

  ‘An art critic as well,’ said Charlotte. ‘Who are you, honey?’

  The gentleman lifted a newspaper out of a reading rack and laid it down on the table. ‘My companion is Mister Cloake. You may call me Mister Twist. So, you have no magic incantations to allow you to see the future?’

  Charlotte slowly shook her head.

  Twist laid aside his cane and moved the palms of his hand over the open pages of the newspaper, as if he was divining for water, humming theatrically as he did so. ‘Ah, the clouds are parting. I see… a robbery. The thief the papers call the Sable Caracal has struck again, leaving her mocking calling card tucked into an empty picture frame.’ He patted his pockets, and with a false look of surprise pulled out an oblong of cardboard with two feline eyes embossed on it. ‘And as if by magic…’

  ‘Seeing as it’s you that’s carrying one of those, perhaps it’s his mocking calling card?’

  Twist spun the card between his long fingers. ‘Well, most people think these cards are just a piece of theatre to taunt the police. But anyone with a deeper understanding knows that it’s actually to announce which criminal lord’s protection the thief is operating under — and which flash mob an interested buyer should contact to obtain a stolen piece. In this case, the Cat-gibbon and her gang of cut throats.’

  Charlotte’s heart sank. And only the Cat-gibbon had known she was here tonight for the painting.

  I’ve been sold out. But who has the balls to lean on the Cat-gibbon? She’d dump the body of any police inspector who came calling in the river just for the cheek of asking her to give up one of her prize thieves.

  Charlotte considered using the jewel nestled on a chain around her neck, the Eye of Fate, but it had been acting oddly ever since these two devils had appeared, throbbing like a piece of cold ice huddled against her skin. It had never done that before.

  Scaring my jewel, scaring the Cat-gibbon — okay, consider me appropriately terrified Mister Twist.

  ‘You’re not with the police.’

  ‘Certainly not the dull plodding kind that feels the collars of pickpockets for transportation to the colonies,’ said Twist.

  ‘So what do you want?’

  ‘You’ve left your calling card,’ said Twist, pushing the oblong of card down onto the reading table. ‘And we’ve come calling.’

  His companion was still behind Charlotte, and she didn’t need the cold burning weight on her chest to know that he had his pistol pointed at her spine.

  ‘An engagement at your gentlemen’s club, perhaps?’

  ‘A more exclusive venue,’ said Twist. ‘The House of Guardians.’

  Parliament! In terms of my usual venues, that’s certainl
y a move up in the world.

  ‘Do you think there’s a ward where I could get elected?’

  Twist shrugged. ‘The bastard issue of Lady Mary’s affair with the scandalous lord commercial, Abraham Quest. I suspect not, if that fact became known.’

  They knew all about her. The Cat-gibbon really had given her up.

  Charlotte felt a familiar twinge of old wounds being rubbed raw. ‘I prefer illegitimate and reserve the term bastard for scoundrels like you.’

  ‘Perhaps I am. Yet, it was your mother who stopped paying your foster parents shortly before she got remarried. Worried about the duke tracing the payments, finding out about you and calling the wedding off, I daresay.’

  And hadn’t they been quick to throw me out onto the streets when the baby farming payments stopped.

  ‘The term for that, Mister Twist, is bitch, not bastard. At least it is, if it’s my mother you’re referring to’

  ‘Oh, but it must rankle,’ said Twist. ‘You should have been the heir to one of the greatest fortunes in the Kingdom, blood as refined as any inside this house — well, at least on your mother’s side, your father was quite the chancer. And here you are, flashing your legs and bosom on stage among bursts of conjurer’s powder, your hand dipping into the cutlery tray for silver when nobody’s watching.’

  ‘I get by.’

  ‘I would imagine that getting by is the thing that weighs most on your soul. Ever a guest, on sufferance at the feast. Have you been inside Parliament, the visitors’ gallery perhaps?’

  Charlotte shook her head.

  ‘You would like it. Its chamber is packed to the gunnels with all the richest and most powerful people in the land. The ones who should have been your peers at some expensive finishing school. Instead, there you were as a child, scraping around for bones with meat left on in the dustbins outside the capital’s hotels.’