The Remnant

by Charlie Fletcher

  And now it was out.

  More than that, a pair of street sellers had set their stalls up in the space on the pavement normally kept clear for the coming and going of the carriage. This, as much as the absence of the everlasting flame in the lantern, told Amos that the house was certainly untenanted, for any opportunistic hawker who dared to block the ingress would have been pitched into the street by a gang of brothers sent expressly by the fathers, who had a particular distaste for what they called “wretched street Arabs clogging up our good frontage.”

  They have abandoned it.

  He stared at her.

  Why?

  She looked up at him, hair rat-tailed with water, face white and shivering, and attempted something that might have been a shrug, or just a more intense shudder at the cold. Her thin lips didn’t move, making a tight blue slash across her face as she kept her jaw clenched to control the chattering of her teeth.

  How would I know? Where is this dry place? I do not feel well and my head hurts.

  He led her across the street to the adjacent empty building where a forbidding gate emblazoned with three foot high lettering announced that “Ruck and Buchan, Master Carriage-Makers” had been the last lamented tenants. Looking around to make sure he was not being too obvious, he worked his trick on the pedestrian door that was let into the larger gate, and swung it open. The Ghost ducked under his arm, and he followed her in, carefully closing the door behind him.

  They stood in the dry space beneath the archway, almost frozen in shock at the sudden absence of rain.

  He stared around at the familiar vacancy. Nothing had changed. The workshop doors remained shut, the windows covered in newspaper. The works had been cleaned out by the brothers on the instructions of Zebulon and Issachar, who had wanted “no damn jumble and filth to attract rats.”

  He had been one of the working party what seemed like a lifetime ago, and it was while sweeping out the narrowest gap between the two establishments—an unpleasant job he had been forced into as the smallest brother—that he had made his discovery, the means by which he had his own private entry into the house of Templebane, an entry and an exit, of course, and one he used when he wished to absent himself unnoticed from the unpleasant bullying atmosphere that the fathers seemed to encourage.

  He had discovered a door and a key.

  The door was a slender one, half the width of a normal entrance, the relic of who knows what previous shape of the house; perhaps, from the traces left on the wall, leading into some kind of privy lean-to, before the premises of the bankrupt cartwright had even been built on the adjoining plot. He’d known the door from the inside, where it sat tight shut and unused in a back corridor of the Templebanes, between a store cupboard and the rack on which the brothers hung their winter coats. It was firmly locked, the key reputedly either lost in a previous century or kept jealously on the imposing key ring of one or other of the fathers.

  He had found the other side of that door, and more than that, in sweeping he had discovered a loose cobble, a cobble so old that it was not stone but wood, and he had lifted it to find the keys, two identical ones, tied together with a length of twine that went to dust as soon as he picked it up. Any obedient son would of course have handed them to his elders.

  Amos had not. He had left one key in place as an insurance against losing the other, and thus had, at a stroke, secured his own private back door to the house of Templebane, one he had taken great care in keeping secret. He stole lamp oil and greased the lock and the hinges of the half-door for weeks before daring to use it, terrified a squeak would betray him. The lock was surprisingly silent, but it took him a month of discreet hinge work to make the operation acceptably noiseless.

  The spare key was still there under the wooden sett, greased and wrapped in a twist of new oilcloth as he had left it a seeming lifetime ago.

  What are you doing?

  Why be dry when we may be warm too? Stay there for a moment.

  His heart raced as the lock creaked treacherously, and then he inched the door open, breath bitten back behind tightly gritted teeth. He heard no movement from within, only the sound of rain drumming on the roof, and slipped into the dimly lit back corridor. The row of hooks on which his brothers’ coats normally hung was bare. Still, not trusting the strong sense of abandonment in the quiet house, he sat on the bench below and removed his boots. He tiptoed silently into the heart of the building, the counting-house, a barn-like space with two rows of high desks running down the middle and a pot-bellied stove standing cold and unlit between them. The roof above was broken by wide skylights which were thrumming noisily with the rain hitting them, and the lofty walls on either side were lined with cabinets, cubbyholes and ceiling-high bookcases crammed with ledgers and bulging bundles of dusty paper which overhung the shelf lips like bracket fungi.

  At the far end of the counting-house was a raised half-glassed office somewhat like a steamship’s wheelhouse, where one or other of the fathers was usually stationed, keeping an eye on the busy scene below. The office was now empty, its door hanging open. This in itself was almost as unprecedented as the extinguished eternal flame over the doorway.

  For some reason, the words of a nursery rhyme began looping through Amos’s head as he slipped silently up the twisting iron stair that led to the office, the one about the king being in his counting-house, counting up his money, the seemingly cheerful rhyme that began with singing a song of sixpence and ended up with a blackbird pecking off an innocent girl’s nose. He peered into the heart of the counting-house: neither of the kings were there, nor was their money, and nor, from the dust, had they been for some considerable while.

  The wardrobe-sized black metal safe at the back of the office stood with its double doors thrown wide: until this moment all Amos had ever seen of it was the outside of those doors with a phoenix-topped bronze medallion announcing it as “Milners Patent Fire and Thief Resistant HOLDFAST—Powderproof Lock.” Now he could see the scarlet paint within, and the fact that it now held nothing, fast or otherwise.

  They’ve done a flit, he thought.

  Can I come in? asked the Ghost, her voice distant in his head.

  One more minute.

  He ran silently to the top of the house and worked his way down, room by room, ensuring that there really was no one left as a caretaker.

  The shared rooms of the brothers were bare, beds left rucked and unmade, their clothes packed and gone. The only bed with clothes hanging by it was his own, and he felt a sting behind his nose as he looked at the threadbare fustian greatcoat, much mended and patched. It was a pitiable thing but it was dry and it was, in a way that made his nose sting with unwanted sentiment, his own. He reached for it and stopped dead in shock. In lifting it from the peg, he revealed something else he had never thought to see again, the seeing of which hit him like a cold slap, forcing his mind into a whirlwind of conjecture as to how it could have returned home without him.

  It was the old brass plate, the one on a leather strap, lost in the headlong flight from the Sluagh when he had abandoned Mountfellon’s coach. Its message was there, deeply incised and unmistakably his:

  My Name is Amos Templebane and I am Mute but Intelligent.

  He stared at it stupidly. It should by rights be mouldering in a field halfway between here and Rutlandshire. But there it was, in his hand. How had it got there? Who had brought it home? Why had someone taken the trouble to bring it up here and put it by his bed as if they knew he would one day return? It made no real sense, and the unreal sense it did hint at was one he was uncomfortable looking at, since it contained the idea that the Sluagh must have returned it to Zebulon or Issachar. It was an uncomfortable idea because that seemed to betoken a deeper involvement between the fathers and the Nightwalkers than he realised. And it reminded him that the Sluagh might well be abroad in the city in a way that had not been possible when he left it last. The Iron Prohibition had been lifted. Locks, horseshoes, railings and even blades would have no es
pecial repellent power to ward them off any more. It might be that it was not only he and the Ghost who had crept back into the city. Maybe the Shadowgangers had preceded them, bringing their shadows with them.

  He took the dry coat and a couple of blankets and the badge and continued on his swift reconnaissance. Two more floors of empty rooms strewn with the evidence of a swift abandonment, and then he was back on the ground floor. The kitchen stank faintly with the memory of long-rotted food, and the dishes left unwashed in the sinks similarly told the tale of a departure hurriedly made.

  He grabbed a bucket of kindling and a scoop of coal and went back into the main floor of the counting-house. There was always the chance someone might come back unexpectedly, and from there it would be possible to hear the tell-tale bells on the front doors and gates, and so have time to effect a retreat unnoticed.

  Come in, close the door behind you and go left. I’m lighting a fire.

  It didn’t take him long to get a roaring blaze thundering in the iron stove. He’d had long practice at it and the chimney always drew well. He left the Ghost on a bench drawn up close to it and went back to the kitchen to search for food while she changed out of her soaking clothes and hung them around the stove to dry. There was nothing edible in the store cupboards. Rats had got to the dry goods and everything else was spoiled with age. He took some tea and a kettle and put it on top of the stove to boil. The Ghost was wrapped in a blanket and staring at the red glow in the door of the stove, seemingly hypnotised by it.

  He had been thinking, as he went through the cupboards in the kitchen, that this was a suitable punctuation point in their relationship, and more than that he had thought of a way to make the parting of their ways possible without the rancorous objections with which she was inevitably going to greet the proposal.

  Seeing the badge again had reminded him of the last time he had used it, introducing himself to Mountfellon and delivering a letter to him.

  The Ghost interrupted him by suddenly stiffening and turning a worried face towards him.

  “You’re sure they’re gone?”

  Yes.

  “What if they come back?”

  They might. But I think they’re long gone.

  He drew a finger along the desktop.

  They’ve shuttered up and gone somewhere else.

  “Have they done this before?”

  No. The house of Templebane never closes. That’s why there’s a Day Father and a Night Father. But there’s talk of other premises elsewhere.

  “Where?”

  Amos shrugged.

  Was just a story some of the older brothers knew. Like a place where they came from. Before London.

  She nodded and turned her face to the fire again, revelling in the warmth.

  “We’ll get warm and dry and then be on our way,” she said. “I don’t feel this is a very safe place to linger.”

  She had found an oversized pair of brass-handled scissors on one of the desks and clutched them like a dagger as she looked around the room.

  He looked up at the storm hammering away at the glass overhead. It had not let up a bit. She put the shears down on the bench at her side and held her hands out to the fire.

  “We can dry our clothes at least,” she said, yawning grudgingly.

  And we’ll hear the doors unlocking before they do, so we can leave the way we came.

  “What if they come in that way?”

  You’ve never seen Issachar or Zebulon then. They are fat men. The door is too narrow.

  He settled on one of the high stools and looked at the brass plaque he had brought down from his old bedroom.

  “What’s that?” she said sharply.

  He showed her the badge and its broken strap.

  Sluagh took it from me when I escaped from Mountfellon’s carriage. If this hadn’t snapped they’d have had me.

  “And we might never have met,” she smiled. “Fancy the sorrow in that. All the bloody fun we’ve had together.”

  Don’t know how it found its way back here. It worries me.

  “Templebanes deal in the shadows. Or maybe Mountfellon found it and sent it.”

  Why?

  “Who knows? And who cares, Bloody Boy. It is your story, not mine.”

  And she bundled herself tighter in the blanket and lay back on the bench, like a dog in front of the fire. He looked at her and felt the desire to be free from her monomania like something he could taste in his mouth. She was like a corrosion, a living rust that ate away at his sense of himself the longer he remained at her side. He had even begun absentmindedly thinking of himself as the Bloody Boy when he wasn’t guarding against it. He would not become the thing she prophesied, firstly because he did not want to be responsible for seeing the shedding of any more blood ever again, and secondly for a darker reason, one that he had only begun to acknowledge to himself: there was something in him that knew he was both good at and drawn to violence, despite what he clung to as his better nature. The new facility he had discovered of moving very fast while the world around him appeared to go slow made this worse. He had felt something snap in him when the power had been released; he now lived in fear of something else snapping within him and unleashing that speed and violence without his conscious control, like a fox in a henhouse. He did not want that. He wanted to be himself, not the corrupt, corroded version that she seemed to be conjuring forth.

  After this we part.

  “No. We still have a common interest,” she insisted, opening an eye and staring at him. “You come with me to Chandos Place, you help me find Mountfellon. Mountfellon must—”

  I know, I know. Mountfellon must die, and I am the Bloody Boy and all that old song. But I tell you I will not be a part of it. I will go to The Oversight in Wellclose Square.

  She spat on the floor.

  “They will not help. They will not even open the door to you.”

  I will help you gain entrance to Mountfellon’s house, but we must part.

  This is the thing he had thought of, the means of effecting the desired punctuation point to end the long sentence of their uncomfortable alliance. He had thought about this, and rediscovering his badge, and then seeing the rows of desks with their inkwells and steel-nibbed scratch-pens, had given him the idea. He had no love for Mountfellon, who had cut his thumb open with a scalpel just to see his blood, and he had been horrified at the collection of flayed things he kept at Gallstaine Hall. He even had a kind of sympathy for the hated Sluagh who had been convinced Mountfellon had experimented on some of their number before skinning them. And though he would not be the Ghost’s weapon, he thought he might finally extricate himself from their association by opening a door for her. What she did once inside the door and close to Mountfellon was not his business. He would be shot of her.

  I will write you a note in the name of my father Zebulon. It will say you have a particular message to deliver to his ears only.

  She looked at him, head cocked on one side. And then she smiled her disturbing smile and stared at the stove, which was now roaring up the cast-iron chimney pipe and sending welcome waves of warmth into the room.

  “That might do, Bloody Boy,” she said. “That might do indeed, for it has been a worry for me that Mountfellon knows your face and might be on his guard. My face is so far withered from the bloom he once knew that there is no chance he will recognise me, not until I reveal myself in all my … my present loveliness.”

  She reached for the brass-handled scissors on the bench by her head and looked at them.

  “These are lovely too, are they not, Bloody Boy?”

  They are just shears.

  “But do you not see why they are so lovely? I shall take them. I’m sure your fathers will not mind.”

  Amos was sure his fathers would mind, but just shrugged. She chuckled and held the shears out at arm’s length, watching how the flames in the stove lit the steel blades. She yawned again and he, despite himself, caught the yawn and thought it might be nice to sleep
for a while.

  “Do you not see how … appropriate these lovely things are?”

  He shrugged. He would write her note of introduction and then he would put his head down for a short nap, and hopefully when he woke the rain would have stopped, his clothes would be dry and he would have the energy to effect the parting of their ways. He would be at The Oversight’s premises within half an hour of the storm’s end if he could possibly manage it.

  Take them.

  He dipped the pen, yawned again and began writing. He would keep it short and to the point, and he would make Zebulon’s signature, which was the one he was most confident of imitating.

  She spoke on, to the fire as much as him.

  “You do not see. But he will, Francis will; he is a cultured man. Educated by the finest tutors that money could buy. Including my father. He and I shared that, if nothing else: a fine classical education.”

  He had never heard her call Mountfellon by his given name, and he hid that thought behind his buttress, wanting to see where this reverie led.

  “What do you know of the Fates?”

  Nothing.

  The pen sputtered and spoiled his painstaking copperplate with blotches of ink. He scrumpled the paper and started on a fresh sheet.

  “The old Greeks believed in many gods, but they believed even the most powerful of them were subject to the rule of destiny. And that rule was spun, measured and executed by Three Fates, three sisters: Clotho, one whose name escapes me and Atropos. Clotho spun the thread of a man’s life. What’s-her-name measured its length. And Atropos, the eldest and most implacable of the sisters, Atropos wielded the shears and cut the threads, bringing death as she did so. Do you know what Atropos means? In Greek? No, I suppose you don’t. It means ‘unturning.’ Fate cannot be turned or avoided. And with these lovely shears I will be Atropos incarnate, and he will find my judgement and execution is equally inevitable.”