She went on rambling about her vengeance and how sweet it should be, and he stopped concentrating on her words and, after three more false starts, finished a note to his satisfaction, and then when he had done so realised her voice had subsided and the only sound was the rain drubbing the skylights, softer now, but set in for a while. And he remembered how nice the idea of a nap was, and he put his head on his arms on top of the desk and thought he should probably stretch out on the floor on a blanket, closer to the fire. But he was footsore and tired, so he thought he might just sit like this for a moment, and then he did so and one moment rolled into another and the rain kept falling and the moments grew into an hour, and they both slept, and a small dribble leaked out of the side of his mouth and smudged the edge of his fairest copy …
He was lurched out of the warm darkness of sleep by a sharp click and the cold touch of metal at the nape of his neck.
Someone was standing at his back, casting a shadow over him. Someone who smelled of wet wool and sweat and a mouth full of at least one badly rotting tooth.
“Quiet now, young Amos Templebane, we don’t want to wake your lady friend, do we?”
It was Abchurch. The sleep Amos had fallen into had been too deep a trap for him to have been able to hear the front door open, muffled as all sound was by the drumming of the rain on the skylights overhead.
Abchurch sniggered quietly.
“Course you don’t ever really make noise, do you? But no fast moves or this goes bang and you go, well, you go everywhere, don’tcha? Now turn round, little brother, so I can watch you and your parrymoor here. She looks a bit old for larks … but any port in a storm, eh? And a boy like you is probably grateful for a bit of white meat even if it’s old hen, ain’tcha?”
He eased back and allowed Amos to straighten up.
Abchurch had not got any lovelier in his absence. His face was a perfect blend of cruelty and weakness, only made even less appealing by prominent eyeballs and his woefully undershot chin. He reached out and pulled the paper Amos had been writing on closer so he could read it.
“Ho,” he said. “A-counterfeiting are we? What’s your game?”
And he giggled as he pointed at the carefully formed “Z” in the signature.
“Why, tell you what, if you’re going to pretend to be someone you ain’t, you chose the wrong father, cos old Zebulon, he’s dead as mutton.”
Amos couldn’t hide his surprise at this news. The Night Father and the Day Father had bestrode his life as malign colossi, and the idea that they could actually die was so outrageous that he had not thought it possible.
“Ho yes, young Amos, ’e was drownded by The Oversight, baptised in the river and come up corpsified.”
The Ghost had woken and was looking blearily at the new arrival.
“What ho! There she bumps!” he said cheerily, then pointed a warning finger at her without moving the gun from where it was aimed at Amos’s face.
“No sharp moves from you either, Mother Hubbard, or I’ll blow the soot off his face and we shall see what colour his insides are, hear me?”
He turned his attention back to Amos.
“Now where you been, cully?”
Amos shrugged.
“Must have been surprised to see the old place shut up and empty. Must have thought it was your lucky day. Sorry to spoil your little assignation. But just cos we ain’t in residence don’t make you cock of the walk. Fings ’ave ’appened while you’ve been off shilly-shallying: fings of considerable import. So Father Issachar, ’e decided that we should change premises and lie low a bit where retribution won’t find us. ’E sent me back for some papers, but ’e’ll be pleased as Punch when I bring home ’is little lost lamb too. ’E’ll be very interested in what you and the old bitch there is up to, I’ll be bound. Why, it’s be like the return of the prodigal son, no doubt, ’cept this time I don’t fink it’ll be the fatted calf what feels the knife, no indeed. I ’spect it will be our own pet darkie facing the fire.”
“Leave him alone.”
His eyes flicked to the Ghost who was sitting up now and glaring at him in her most determinedly unhinged way.
“Come again?” he said.
“Leave him alone,” she replied, voice unwavering. Abchurch snorted a laugh. She stood up. He stepped back on reflex, then flushed with anger.
“Or what, dearie?”
“Or he’ll kill you,” she said, stepping into the space he’d surrendered.
He bunched his fist and lashed out at her. She tumbled back into the bench and bounced untidily onto the floor.
“You can mash that noise, you old bitch, or you shall have another—”
Amos went fast-but-slow, despite himself, without thinking.
And less than a minute later he was stumbling out of the front door of the house, into the rain-slick street, hand over his mouth as if containing a powerful urge to vomit.
The deluge had stopped.
A cackle of the Ghost’s humourless laughter followed him onto the pavement from the depths of the house he was hurrying away from.
“Blood cries out, Amos Templebane, blood cries out!”
He sidestepped the horse-drawn omnibus sluicing past on the half-flooded street and crossed to the pavement opposite, keeping on walking like a blank-eyed automaton. She emerged and followed him. He was still barefoot and he had a steel-tipped pen clenched in his right fist, like a dagger. East. She was carrying his boots and had draped the two blankets around her shoulders. She looked unnervingly bright-eyed and cheerful.
She took his arm, almost playfully, handed him his boots and looked at him as they walked.
“You’re getting better at this,” she said, reaching up and wiping something from his chin. “Scarcely any blood on you this time. I shall soon have to give you a new name.”
CHAPTER 21
THE HOUSE AT THE END OF THE WORLD
The Smith had returned to Portree and found a new man willing to drive him in a trap to the small harbour at Uig. Here he had paid another man and his son to sail him across to the island of North Uist which lay stretched almost invisible beneath the clouds coming in from the north west. After a windblown, wave-buffeted crossing, he spent the night in the tacksman’s square-built house overlooking the small harbour at Lochmaddy, where the initially surprised tacksman found, after looking deep into the stranger’s eyes, that the Englishman was in truth no stranger at all, but an old family acquaintance who was of course expected, and most welcome to bed and board and the freshest fish to his supper that the island could provide.
On the morrow, The Smith thanked his host and borrowed a sturdy horse he was assured was sure-footed, being a recent cross between a large Norwegian Fjord and the smaller Eriskay pony, whose dappled silver coat it had inherited. He took the grey and turned it towards the winding track that led across the heather even further into the west.
Once more, it was a journey he had made before, but this landscape seemed scarcely changed from the first time he had crossed it, nor from any of the subsequent visits he had been obliged to make over the intervening chasm of years. The heather covered the interior of the island, hiding innumerable treacherous bogs and lochans, and he kept to the winding road that skirted the wayward swoops of the coastline instead. It was the long way to go round in terms of the ground covered, but it was, he knew, the shortest and surest means of arriving at his destination.
The island was low-lying with few significant hills or peaks, and so studded with inlets and small lochs that from the air he had been told—by one who could share the eyes of a bird—it seemed as much made of water as rock and looked more like lacework than firm ground. Because of this, the coast road meandered seemingly without rhyme or reason. The few houses were all low and pleasing to the eye in the way that they seemed part of the land itself, with thick stone walls and deep-set doors beneath rounded mounds of heather thatch, held down against the wind by rope nets weighted with hanging stones. Some had windows, all had benches aga
inst the sunny side of the house close by the door and most had a territorially jealous sheep-dog that would run and bark at them as they passed. The horse was steady and didn’t shy, perhaps knowing the barking and growling was mostly for showing teeth and not a prelude to using them.
As the day progressed, the houses became fewer and spaced further apart. He turned off the main track and headed on to a deserted peninsular, skirting a hill and climbing a little as he did so until he found the whole wide Atlantic spread away into the distance before him, with only a single black house tucked into the lee of the hill above the patch of machair, where the dark heather gave way to the softer green grass of the sea lawn and a small hidden bay beyond it.
It looked deserted, but he knew he was expected.
The ravens had begun circling him at a discreet distance ever since he had left the more cultivated and peopled flat part of the island known as Middlequarter, about four miles back. He dismounted and unsaddled the horse, leading it to a small burn beside the house, where it dropped its head and drank deeply.
“You can unbridle it too; it won’t wander,” said a voice from the other side of the building.
He unbuckled the leather straps and patted the grey.
“Thank you,” he said into the horse’s ear.
“Acht, he won’t understand your foreign English,” said the voice. “That’s a good island horse. Only speaks honest Gaelic …”
The Smith walked past the rounded end of the building and saw the back of an old woman sitting on a rock at the top of a small round hummock which made a natural terrace in front of the black house. Her long white hair whipped like a pennant in the light breeze and she seemed too engrossed in watching the featureless seascape below to turn and greet him. She was surrounded by ravens: more than thirty of the dark birds ranged around her pale figure like a bodyguard. And in contrast to her, they were all facing him, black eyes locked on his every move.
“Glory of the day to you,” he said.
The old woman turned to look at him out of eyes that seemed still to be sharp despite being clouded with age. Her face was as much of a contrast as her hair was to the ravens: it was aged, tough and weather-beaten, but there was a concentration of lines radiating from the corner of her eyes which somehow spoke of a lifetime of smiling and laughing.
“Glory of the day to you too, Wayland.”
The pair of eyes which had followed him since he left London dropped out of the sky as the Raven joined the battalion of what were clearly her blood-kin.
The woman levered herself off the rock and walked towards him with a lopsided gait which bent her to the left as she moved. She didn’t pause as she passed him, but just clapped him companionably on the arm and went on into the house.
“Sit and rest your bones,” she said, emerging with a horn beaker full of water, which she handed to him. He swigged half in one gulp and then the other in a second. He nodded his thanks.
“Sit,” she said. “I’ll get you another.”
He lowered himself onto the well-worn bench and stretched his legs out, feeling the gentle breeze on his face to be as refreshing as the clear water he had just drunk.
She emerged and handed him the full beaker and eased herself carefully onto the bench at his side, leaning back on the sun-warmed stone of the house with a sigh.
“Your ride will have set tongues wagging from here to Berneray,” she said. “We still don’t see many strangers, and the island folk are sharp-eyed as ever.”
“Do they never notice who you are?” he said.
“No,” she said. “Of course not. They’ve forgotten who that was, long past. You, in London, do they?”
“No,” he said. “But it’s easy enough to go unnoticed in a crowd. Out here, in the open, the islanders so thin on the ground, must be harder.”
“Oh no,” she laughed easily. “I’m still no more than the old lady who stays at the westernmost point to them, the hag from an taigh air iomall an t-saoghail—the house at the end of the world.”
“I’d still say it’s harder to hide here than in a city,” he said. “They’d notice things about you. Like you’re always here, generation to generation.”
“Oh well, as to that, I’m also the old lady who lives a long time and then goes away for a bit and then word comes that she’s left her croft to her niece who comes back and carries on as before, until she too seems to their children to be an old lady who then one day leaves and another niece comes back, and so it goes on—”
“And they still never notice it’s you again and again?”
“Acht, that’s not the hard bit.” She punched him good-naturedly on the arm again and gathered his cup as she stood. “The hard bit is remembering to make them see me getting older at the right pace, not as I really am. As I really always am—”
“I’d like to see that,” he said.
“Would you now?” she said, raising an eyebrow in a very un-old-ladylike way. “And what would my neighbours think?”
He looked out at the empty moorland and machair, sweeping it with his eyes.
“What neighbours?”
“The ones who would be troubled if they were to see the snow leave my hair and my poor old back straighten, what would they think, the poor souls?”
He saw nothing moving in the landscape except for the birds on the beach and the flock of ravens on the rocks around them.
“I imagine they’d think you were a very beautiful woman, in the prime of your strength,” he said, turning back to look at her.
She had gone, or rather she had stepped back into the door of the black house.
“Would they now?” she said, standing shielded from anyone’s view but his own in the deep whitewashed embrasure made by the thick stone walls.
“Yes,” he said, feeling an unaccustomed thickening in his throat. The old lady who stooped to one side and looked out from beneath a flag of white hair was gone, and in her place was a strong-looking woman somewhere between forty and fifty, with hair every bit as wild and sleekly black as the ravens around her door. The cloudy eyes were now clear and hazel-coloured and—at this moment—caught in something between a laugh and a challenge.
“There you are,” he said. “Màthair nam Fitheach.”
She smiled.
“I am always the Mother of Ravens,” she said. “Just as you are always The Smith.”
He found he was smiling back at her. It seemed as if he hadn’t smiled in an eternity.
“I have travelled the length of Britain noticing how much has changed,” he said. “You have no idea how it … how it is to see something, someone precisely as they were so long ago.”
“And it’s good to see you too,” she said. “In the flesh. Though of course I have seen you with other eyes over the years.”
He continued to look at her, taking in the forgotten but deep familiarity of her face until she waved her hand in front of it in a gesture of mild irritation, the sting of which was removed by the grin it came with.
“Are you pretending this isn’t going to happen, Smith? The way you always do whenever we meet?”
“No,” he said. “No, Beira, I am not. I am just thinking we are perhaps a little old for this.”
Her laugh was deep and open—and then he was in the doorway too, then they were both lost inside the house and there was no thinking or talking for a long while, thought there was more laughter and some other mutedly joyful noises which only the ravens heard.
CHAPTER 22
OLD FRIENDS
Mr. Sharp woke from his deep sleep to find the light of a new day fighting a thick ceiling of storm-clouds over the city. The air was fresh and the gutters were still gurgling from a deluge he had clearly just slept through. He rolled out of The Smith’s bed and was surprised to find his clothes were not where he had left them, tumbled on a chair, but were laid out clean and freshly ironed.
He could not find his boots so he descended the wooden stairs in his stockinged feet and entered the workshop-cum-kit
chen to find them standing against the wall by the door.
“You’ll be hungry?” said Ida, who was sitting cross-legged on a workbench with her crossbow in pieces all around her.
“I slept all day,” he said.
“And the rest. You missed a corker of a rainstorm and all, come down by the bucket-load it did,” said Charlie Pyefinch, entering with a sodden-looking Archie trotting at his heels. “You been asleep a day and a night!”
“Cook’s medicine,” said Ida.
Sharp sat and pulled on his boots.
“Well, I feel better for it. Where is she?”
“Cook’s sitting with Miss Falk,” said Charlie.
Sharp’s head came up.
“Why? Is she turned for the worse?”
“No,” said Ida. “She’s just sleeping. I think Cook just likes to sit with her. She was so happy to get her back. If you are hungry, there is tea in the pot and I can get you ham and bread?”
“I’ll get it,” said Charlie. “You’ve got oil all over your fingers.”
“Good,” said Ida. “One for me too then.”
Sharp drank the tea and quickly made himself a sandwich. As he did so, he watched Charlie and Ida together and felt a pang of envy, both for their youth and their evident ease with each other.
Then he washed his mug and the plate he’d used and went into the back room of the workshop. He quickly unlocked a cupboard and selected a pair of knives which were identical to the ones stolen from him by Dee in the mirrors. He secured them in their accustomed places and walked back out into the workshop, feeling not only better than he had in an age, but properly dressed.
“Where is the Wildfire exactly?” he said.
“Lead chests are sunk just off the cut at Irongate Steps, between the Tower and St. Katherine’s Dock,” said Charlie.
“Please tell Cook and Sara if she wakes that that is where I have gone.”
“I’ll chum you,” said Charlie, getting off the bench where he had been sitting with Ida. “Me and Hodge been doing turnabout at the Tower, and I should be getting over there soon anyway. I was just sitting out that downpour we had earlier.”
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