The Remnant

by Charlie Fletcher

  Bidgood relaxed, still confused by the mismatch between the gently well-born voice and the villainously disreputable person from whom it came. And then the thought hit him that it was odd that this woman should be asking about this particular property—

  “They were friends of mine, or rather, the family were friends of my youth, when I was not as you see me now,” she said with a sad smile, tumbling a reply into his mind before the question of who or what she was had even really formed. Even in the extreme state of despair with which he was gripped, Amos couldn’t help but admire her technique: there were advantages to hearing the thoughts of others that enabled one to direct conversations to one’s own satisfaction, leaving unproductive and distracting lines of inquiry to die stillborn and unexamined. “It would mean so much to me to know what has occurred, and if they are well.”

  Bidgood relaxed. He guessed at a familiar, somewhat melodramatic but no less sad story for the woman’s present plight: born to the purple, riches lost in her youth, a dissolute father perhaps, a rake, a gambler … Oh yes, he had seen the end of several such little morality plays acted out in front of him on the bench, and had seen some of the principal actors sent to the Old Marshalsea to languish in the cruel limbo of the debtor’s wing which had only closed a couple of years before. Who knew, this lady might well be the sad victim of such a history. He looked up at the spire of the Danish Church and decided it behoved him to be charitable and answer her.

  “Well then, I am sorry to tell you, sorry indeed to say that they are gone. I hope the news does not distress you.” He indicated the building works going on at the top of the square. “There was an explosion in the old sugar manufactory that previously occupied the premises there, and it led to the house at the bottom of the square, due to gravity, being destroyed. Gravity, yes, gravity.”

  He cleared his throat. He was a man who enjoyed the sound of his own voice, and once started he often found himself saying more than he had intended. The fact that no one in his court had the authority to curtail his bent towards expansive peroration had fed this bad habit.

  “Ah yes, fatal gravity and streams of burning treacle were the downfall of the house, you see, flowing like lava, downhill right past the very doors of Wilton’s Music Hall here, all the way down to the house in question. Most unfortunately a cartful of kerosene barrels was hitched in front of the doomed building and this led to a terrible, which is to say devastating explosion. Devastating, yes, is the very word: all was lost, as you see, blown to smithereens …”

  Ask about The Oversight.

  He won’t know about them as such.

  Amos thought of the things he had witnessed in what he increasingly thought of as his previous life, the one spent fetching and carrying and spying; in the latter capacity, he had stood watch in the shadows on many nights, keeping a list of the comings and goings at the house for Issachar and Zebulon.

  Ask about the white-haired young woman. Miss Falk.

  “Thank you, kind sir,” said the Ghost. “And do you happen to know what happened to a Miss Falk.”

  “Ah no,” said Bidgood. “Miss Sara Falk, the jewess. No, she has not been seen for some considerable time. It is possible that she and her companions perished in the fire. It was a conflagration of an intensity, it was, an intensity strong enough to burn bones themselves, I believe. And the fall of the house: why, I witnessed that myself, though I missed the start of the fire. I had been called to the scene expressly once the alarm had been given. The fall of the house was a most considerable crash. A considerable one.”

  Ask about the others. Please.

  “And her companions?” she said.

  Bidgood felt a hungry rumble in his stomach and remembered the waiting steak and oyster pie, and decided that his charitable expenditure of conversation and information had reached the stage where it was coming between himself and the anticipated gastronomic delight.

  “Er, I do not know who they were, but she did keep an irregular house; somewhat irregular, some might say … but anyway, they are gone and so must I be. Good day.”

  And with a tip of his hat he walked away supperwards, wondering as he went what it had been about the strangely commanding beggarwoman that had made him offer a salute instead of a ha’penny.

  Amos slumped to the pavement, like a puppet with its strings cut. He did not notice or care that he was sitting in a puddle. This is what the death of hope felt like. Even when travelling by himself in the wide open, empty countryside, he had never felt so alone.

  “Better come with me, Bloody Boy,” said the Ghost, putting a hand on his shoulder that he felt too broken to resist. There was a kind of sadness in her voice, not the exulting tone he might have expected, which made the desolation in front of him cut all the deeper. “You thought I was exaggerating. Look at the ruin of the Safe House. It wasn’t safe and now it isn’t even a house. The Oversight it is dead and gone. I’m all the family you have now.”

  CHAPTER 24

  THE SOUTERRAIN

  The Smith and Beira were lying motionless and happily tangled on the box bed at the end of the one room inside the blackhouse, watching the sunrays turn gold on the smoke-tarred roof trees above them. It felt to The Smith, who never rested, that this was like a stolen moment suspended in time, so much so that as he dozed and woke and dozed again he could no longer tell if they had been here for minutes or hours, or even days. It was not an unpleasant sensation and he felt revived by it, and also strangely protected. It was as if they were a pair of flies caught in a tawny piece of amber and thus rendered unchanging and also incapable of any further action. And then she groaned happily and slowly stretched, rolled over and nudged him.

  “Come on, old man, come sit with me outside and watch the sun dip.”

  “Are you not worried that your neighbours will see you?” he said.

  “No,” she smiled. “My ravens will see them before they come in sight. I was teasing you earlier.”

  “Teasing,” he said, running the word around his mouth as if sampling an unfamiliar taste. “Is that what it was?”

  “It was a ploy to get you to come inside,” she said. “As you well knew. This is an old dance and we both know the steps by heart.”

  “Well, I like the dance, and the partner,” he smiled back at her, sitting up and looking for his clothes. As he turned, she saw his back and involuntarily reached out and touched the small of it. Where the rest of his body was clear and unmarked, a swirl of ancient black tattoos was reaching up from his waist, as if filling in old track marks, the leading edges of the stains purple and yellow, like an intricate bruise, or infection of the blood. It was a noxious, diseased-looking thing.

  “What?” he said.

  “Nothing …” she said, her eyes leaving the stain and finding a bottle on a far shelf on the other side of the room.

  “Oh, I know,” he smiled again. “I felt a twinge back on the island-within-the-island. But it’s nothing. You know it’s nothing; you’ve seen it before. A little comes back when things falter, but as long as it’s just a small bit like that, no bigger than your hand, I control it and it fades soon enough. You know that …”

  “I know that,” she said, and because he was turned away and her voice was unfaltering, he missed the stutter in her eyes. Her hand remained in the small of his back dwarfed by the black and corrupted swirl of tattoos spreading far beyond it, a thick trunk following his spine and then spreading ominously across his broad shoulders like the louring crown of a dark oak tree.

  “Now let’s have a drop of my uisge and enjoy the last of the light as it dies in the west,” she said, slapping him on the back as she stepped off the bed and walked unselfconsciously naked to the shelf where she found a stone bottle from which she poured him a measure in a small horn cup and then one for herself. She picked up a blanket from the chair by the fire and wrapped herself in it as she returned and gave him the whisky with a nudge.

  “This is the part of the old dance where you get sad because I’m
not her, and I tell you she wouldn’t begrudge you the little human warmth we just shared. And then you say nothing at all, just like you’re doing now, and I say—”

  He sipped the whisky and grimaced as it went down his throat, sending a warm fire into his belly.

  “You say that without a little human warmth and softness I would break and become less than human, which would be dangerous for someone with my … gifts.”

  “There you go,” she said. “You like the uisge?”

  “You’re getting the hang of it,” he said. “Smokier.”

  “That’s just the peat,” she said. “It’s not just us. It’s getting older too. Now come on, bring a blanket. I like to watch the sunsets.”

  They found their way back out into the light and sat against each other, wrapped in blankets and leaning against the wall of the black house. The flock of ravens had moved discreetly further away, as if they had decided to allow them some privacy.

  “So,” she said. “To business. What message must the ravens carry?”

  “The Iron Prohibition is broken; the Sluagh are unbound and may look to settle old scores. And the Last Hand fails.”

  She stared at him in shock.

  “The Sluagh are unbound? You didn’t think to tell me that when you first arrived?”

  He took a sip of the whisky.

  “Well, that might well have changed the mood a little, might it not?” His eyes flicked behind him to the black house. “You’re not the only one who can make a ploy.”

  He smiled down at her.

  “It’s good once in a while to forget for a brief instant the thing you are bound to. You told me that a long time ago.”

  “Did I?”

  “You did.”

  He pulled her closer, and put his lips on her forehead.

  “And I thank you for it.”

  “And how has it been, this thing you are bound to?” she said.

  He shrugged and looked at the flat line of the horizon.

  “Sometimes it is good. Sometimes it’s bad. And then at the worst times, it feels like forever.”

  “Forever?” she said.

  “Doesn’t it feel like forever to you?”

  “No.”

  She shook her hair loose and ran her fingers through to comb some kind of order into it.

  “Mostly it feels like it’s all gone by in a flash.”

  “I can’t believe that.”

  “Well, it’s true. There’s so much to see and think on.”

  He looked around at the wild emptiness all around them—the heather at their back, the grey rocks and the expanse of green machair sweeping away to the tufted dunes and the long, empty white-sand beach beyond it, and then the unending immensity of the ocean.

  “But there’s nothing but this to see,” he said.

  “There’s much to be said for simplicity,” she said. “Though if you were to come here in spring, the machair there contains worlds within worlds, so many small wildflowers, all shapes and sizes and variations, you’ll find all the wondrous complexity you could wish for … and then the sea, every day it throws something new on the shore as it comes and goes. Oh, there’s plenty enough to keep your attention if you know how to see things.”

  “You don’t mind being cut off from the world?” he said.

  “Cut off?” she laughed. “Is it cut off you think I am?”

  She pointed at the ravens.

  “It’s not just their eyes I share. It’s all ravens and their kin. Do you truly not see how it is after all these years of knowing me, knowing I’m here, always here and nowhere else?”

  “The black house at the end of the world,” he said.

  “It has to be simple,” she said. “With all that I see when I’m in their eyes, it has to be simple when I’m back in my own head. Just sky, sea, land and the weather moving across the gulf of air between them. If it wasn’t simple, I’d go mad. Like you.”

  “You think I’ve gone mad?” he said.

  “No,” she said. “I think you’ve always been mad. You’ve always thought you could keep things in balance. You’ve always believed the darkness can be kept at bay.”

  “It can,” he said.

  “Not all the darkness,” she said. “And not all the time. And isn’t hope a kind of madness, like faith? I didn’t say it was a bad kind of mad. It’s the kind of madness that you need to have in order to keep walking forwards, I think.”

  “It’s time to send the ravens,” he said.

  “Ah,” she said after a pause. “It’s that bad again.”

  “Yes,” he said, finishing the glass and grimacing as the spirit burned gently down his throat. “Actually, it’s worse.”

  “Worse than sending the ravens?”

  “Yes. You’re going to have to give me my blood back.”

  She exhaled in a low whistle.

  “You’re worried about the Wildfire,” she said.

  “I’m always worried about the damned Wildfire,” he said. “I’m just even more worried about it when things are falling apart like this.”

  “Something else,” she said. “There’s something else, Wayland—what is it?”

  “I’m not sure,” he scowled. “The Wildfire always wants out. That’s what makes it so … volatile. It’s like it has a mind of its own.”

  “It’s got a hunger of its own,” she said. “I don’t know if it has to have a mind as we think of a mind for it to have a hunger.”

  “Its hunger is bad enough, and we know how to keep it safe from that,” he said, “but this is something new. When we’ve lost control, in the past, it has been because of accidents, more than anything. This time I think there’s a different hunger at play. I think whatever is moving against us is after the fire itself. And that is new. And that is why—”

  He paused and grimaced as if a chill had just shuddered through him.

  “Well, that is why I need my blood back.”

  She smiled at him and put her hand on his shoulder.

  “Are you hesitating because you know in one of the old stories they tell about us, this is where I trap you by my feminine wiles and leave you penned in a secret cavern, and kingdoms fall and fellowships are broken as a result?”

  He reached his hand up and she let him pull her face down to meet his, she kissed his forehead, as if returning the previous one he had given her.

  “Old stories,” he snorted. “Stories are a good way to spoil perfectly fine truths by trying to explain them.”

  “If you say so,” she said. “You of all people would know about that. Well, if you’re to have your blood back once more, it’s definitely something we’d be better doing at night. Wouldn’t do to be seen lifting rocks in the daylight.”

  “No,” he said. “Though in truth I wish I could forego the day and night it will take, for even twenty-four hours seems like a luxury we can ill afford, and good though our time together has been, I must be on my way south as soon as I can. The steamer will take me from Skye to Glasgow the day after tomorrow, and the railway will have me home by midnight on that day.”

  “So fast, the modern world,” she said with a sigh. “You’ll have time for another dram before we go to the hill. It’ll warm your old bones.”

  She reached for the stone bottle.

  “And then I’ll put some broth on the fire for us both. It won’t be fell dark for another hour, and it gets cold out there.”

  CHAPTER 25

  THE ADMONITORY FLOORBOARD

  Issachar Templebane did not particularly enjoy his enforced exile deep in the countryside, but it was not an uncomfortable one, the old house being sufficiently large to keep his sons close enough to ensure his safety, yet far enough away to diminish the irritation their company engendered.

  He sat by the fire in the study that adjoined his bedroom, at a desk covered in neat piles of paper, the biggest of which was held in place by a significantly large pistol. He was reading the cream of the day’s crop of letters and notes brought to him from th
e extensive network of lookouts and casual informers the house of Templebane had long cultivated and relied on. The one in question contained the very interesting information that a certain Ruby who plied her trade on Neptune Street had seen Mr. Sharp returned to London on the day previous, when he had been skulking about on the riverbank at Irongate Steps between St. Katherine’s Dock and the Tower. He read it twice and made a corresponding entry in the crabbed and tiny handwriting that filled his daybook and was in its way part of a long-running, seemingly random and hidden history of London itself.

  Ruby was a useful pair of eyes to him, and was even on occasion a useful pair of hands and lips, in that he used her to carry messages, verbal or written, to other intermediaries whom his sons might draw attention to themselves by meeting. It was Ruby who had heard from a friend of a friend that Coram Templebane still lived, a fact he had not shared with his other sons. Issachar had no interest in claiming the crippled man, especially since he was thought a lunatic now, and was held in the Bedlam Hospital, but he did, through other watchers, keep an eye on him, and through this was aware that The Oversight, the hated Oversight, visited him regularly and asked questions that he was apparently unwilling to answer. Issachar looked on life as a long transaction, a game in which every piece, however unimportant, might one day be useful. And so he monitored Coram in case he said something he shouldn’t, and also because one day Issachar might want to use him to spread a little misleading information to his enemies. He had a girl who pumped a reformed drunk called Bill Ketch for news of Coram, and every fortnight or so her report arrived among the myriad other missives which flowed from the city to land on this desk.

  Those missives reached him every day via a purposely circuitous route of errand boys, go-betweens, cut-outs and carriers, an untraceable journey designed to confound any enemies who might try and follow a note all the way from London to his anonymous ancestral bolthole. Locally he was not even known by his real name, nor had any of his forebears: here in the rarely travelled bucolic backwater, they were known as Fenman, a pseudonym chosen by one of his ancestors to refer to the flat watery landscape the family hailed from in the old witch-finding days.