The Remnant

by Charlie Fletcher

  And he came and stood with her, his hand on her arm as she told him.

  And when she had, he shook his head in incredulity.

  “So then … Mountfellon is her father?”

  “I think he might be. He raped the young woman, and she was wearing the ring, the ring that was broken, the one Lucy showed us and said was the only thing she had of her mother …”

  “Do you think Lucy knows?”

  “No,” she said. “No. I don’t think so.”

  “Let us go home,” he said. “We can come back whenever we wish. But you are exhausted.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I think I am. And I want to see what Cook has made of that Amos Templebane.”

  “You think we can use him?”

  “I want to know if she thinks we can trust him. Because if we can, maybe he can help us get inside Coram Templebane’s head, as you and Hodge were unable to do.”

  “That’s a risk,” said Sharp.

  “At this stage, it’s all risk,” she said. “That’s why we need good judgement. And no one’s a better judge than Cook.”

  They left by the front door.

  “Leave it unlocked,” said Sara, thinking of Ida. “If Mountfellon gets burgled, so much the better, but in truth I do not think anyone would try the front door on such a public street, and we can get back in without trouble on the morrow, if we need to.”

  They stepped onto the pavement and moved fast into the side streets, heading east.

  They did not notice the Ghost.

  But she had been watching the door, alarmed at having woken to find Amos gone from his post. And as soon as they were out of sight, she flitted across the cobbles and proved Sara’s judgement to be entirely wrong, as she opened the front door and slipped inside, almost without anyone seeing her at all.

  High in the face of the house opposite, the whey-faced child who could not sleep was at her customary position, nose pressed against the pane of her bedroom window. If anyone else in her house was awake, she might have told them what she saw, but they weren’t, and she yawned and watched on.

  The Ghost stood in the middle of the high-ceilinged hallway and listened, and for a very long time the building was silent as the grave. And then she began to search the house like a silent wraith, moving from the basement to the attic. She armed herself with a brutal dissecting knife from The Citizen’s study. And when she came downstairs, she faced the one door she had yet to try.

  She carefully eased open the door to the salon with the shrouded pier-glass and stood in the doorway, knife at her side.

  CHAPTER 39

  NIGHT AND THE DREADNOUGHT PORTER

  The dog cart slowed as they approached the narrow bridge spanning the water that flowed through The Gut, the thin steep-sided channel separating the Isle of Dogs from the rest of London. Hodge loosened the knife in his belt and noticed, from the sudden lightening of the springs, that Ida had dropped silently off the back. At the edge of his vision he caught a flicker as she ran wide of them, taking up a covering position in the shadows, with a good line of sight towards the spot where the three Sluagh had taken up their semi-permanent residence.

  A second creak of the springs told him Charlie had dismounted and was now walking alongside.

  “Easy now,” muttered Hodge. “Keep your blades out of sight. Don’t want to set them off. This is going to be ticklish enough as it is.”

  He wasn’t entirely comfortable with the idea of presenting the Sluagh with a severely damaged and abused member of their tribe. It was a situation ripe with potential for things to tumble into violence before explanations could be given or heard. However, he knew the Sluagh would be able to minister to him better than they could, and he had severe reservations about whether the thing would survive transit across the running water. It was the nature of the prohibition that they were unable to voluntarily cross, but that if they were either invited or carried across the flow by one with authority they felt considerable discomfort but survived. Hodge was a Terrier Man, as ruthless towards his natural enemies as Jed was to rats, but he also had the gentleness of a man who spent his life with animals, hating unnecessary cruelty or suffering. He too had arrived at the destruction of the Safe House in time to hear the burning horse screaming, and part of the liking he had quickly developed for Ida was her matching fury at the inhumanity of it. The Sluagh was an historic enemy, but this one had also clearly been cruelly and painfully mistreated. Jed hated rats, but he killed them clean. There was nothing clean about what had happened to this Sluagh.

  So he drew on the reins, applied the brake and stood and looked down at the place where the three Sluagh had taken up their sentry post. He held his hands wide.

  Jed whined on the seat next to him. He heard an answering noise from Archie, who he was pleased to see was now disciplined enough to have remained close to Charlie’s legs. The terrier might still be close to a puppy, but he was learning.

  “We need to talk,” he told the darkness. “No harm meant, and good may come of it for you and yours. Let’s have a parley, like.”

  The darkness held its tongue. Somewhere in the distance, a locomotive clanked along the Blackwall Railway, approaching West India Docks, but apart from that the night was as still as it got on that eastern edge of the city.

  “Hello?” he said, peering blindly into the shadows, as if his ruined eyes could see, when in fact he was riding in his dog’s head, seeing with Jed’s eyes. “Anyone home? We’ve a hurt one of your own here in the cart, not hurt by us, but needing what succour you can give better than we can.”

  No one came forward. The shadows remained shadows.

  “No tricks here,” he said. “He needs help, and sharpish too, I reckon.”

  “Archie can’t smell them,” said Charlie quietly.

  “Mmm,” said Hodge. “Nor Jed. Go on, dogs. Seek ’em.”

  Jed bounded off the box-seat and scrabbled into the darkness. Archie followed close on his tail.

  Ida came up to the cart, crossbow lowered.

  “They’re not there. I’d see them if they were.”

  The dogs barrelled back out of the darkness and leapt back on the cart.

  Amos was sitting between the unconscious figures of the Green Man and the Sluagh, his eyes locked on the same darkness all the others were focused on.

  You’re sure?

  Hodge turned and looked at him.

  “That’s the Sluagh for you, always turning up where you least expect them, never there when you need them. Now, you and Charlie keep a hold of that one you’ve got there, because crossing the water’s likely to make him buck and thrash like a whirligig.”

  Charlie and Ida got back on the cart, and the Sluagh did not buck or thrash as the cart took the bridge with all the speed Hodge could muster as he tried to minimise the pain the creature would feel: it just flinched and gagged out a noise halfway between a whimper and a croak, and then was still.

  “How’d he do?” said Hodge, looking back.

  Ida held two fingers to the tattooed neck.

  “Still alive but he’s got a pulse like a baby bird. I think he’ll be leaving us soon.”

  Amos stared at the drawn face, arced and stippled with the hated tattoos, and tried to feel the sympathy they all clearly felt. He just felt a thin drizzle of fear and a strong wish to get out of the cart and away from it.

  Five minutes later, he had his wish. The dog cart stopped outside The Folley and Cook emerged to meet them carrying a shuttered lantern. As Hodge brought her up to speed with the night’s adventures, Amos helped Charlie and Ida carry the Sluagh into a clean wood-panelled room behind the forge. It was warm and there were four bunk-beds, two on either side, and one box-bed across the end of the room, built in with sliding wooden doors. They laid the Sluagh on one of the lower bunks.

  Ida then took Amos through to the kitchen and sat with him by the welcome heat of the range while Cook went to look at the injured Sluagh. Ida didn’t talk as they waited and watched Cook bustle back i
n and get her medicine box with much tutting and a brow like thunder, but her presence was companionable. As soon as Cook left for the second time, she darted across the room and cut a wedge from a thick truckle of cheese on the sideboard. She broke it in half and gave one to Amos.

  “Cheshire Cheese,” she said. “It’s crumbly but good.”

  He took it and watched her sit back with her chair tipped against the range as she ate it. He bit into the piece she had given him, and realised how hungry he was.

  It is good.

  “Told you,” she said with a wink. “Just don’t tell Cook. She’s very strict about us taking food behind her back.”

  Thank you.

  She nodded and smiled and for the next ten minutes said no more, but managed not to look at all like she was guarding him. Which of course they both knew she was. And then Cook returned, muttering and angry, and scrubbed her hands in the sink as Ida was called away by Charlie to help Hodge with the Green Man who, according to the dictates of his nature, was to be quartered in the open air.

  Cook clattered about with pots and pans and plates and spoons, murderously engaged in some species of diversionary culinary warfare to dissipate the anger she had felt at the sight of the tortured creature in the bunk-room. Amos was content to just sit and watch and bask in the warmth of the fire, and consider the fact that The Oversight was not—if these were representative examples of its membership—at all what he’d imagined. It seemed much more like a chaotic family than a disciplined order of supranatural guardians. And he also wondered if all this noise and bustle might possibly result in some more cheese. The piece Ida had shared with him seemed to have loosened the juices in his mouth and he was, shamefully, almost drooling at the smells coming from the direction of the range.

  Cook suddenly turned and pointed a wooden spoon.

  “So,” she said. “You can’t talk?”

  Amos shook his head. It was just a spoon, but it felt like a pistol was being aimed at him.

  No.

  “Have you ever talked?” she said.

  No.

  “Can you hear our thoughts?” she said.

  He concentrated. His brow crinkled slightly.

  No.

  “Would you tell me if you could?”

  He met her eyes. A long beat passed.

  Probably not. But I can’t anyway.

  “It’s the rings,” said Cook, showing the bloodstone on her finger. “They’re not just badges. They’re wards.”

  What are wards?

  “Shields. They’re protection.”

  She turned to the range and clattered something into a plate.

  Against people like me?

  “Against people like you,” she said, turning and now sliding a heaped plate across the table towards him. “Now eat this, if that cheese hasn’t spoiled your appetite.”

  He noted that those pale eyes clearly missed nothing, and put the thought away for future perusal.

  Sorry.

  She grunted.

  “That young Trousers thinks I can’t see through her. Not like you. Eat up, because I can almost see the blessed gas lamp right through you, you’re so sharp-set.”

  He stared at the plate.

  “Go on,” she said. “It won’t bite you.”

  Eel pie?

  “You don’t like eels?” she said. “What kind of Londoner are you?”

  No. I like eel pie. I mean, I did. Once.

  The memory hit him of the first time he met the Ghost: he’d been drawn to the thrilling yet unsettling novelty of a voice in his head addressing him directly, the first time he had ever had someone talk back to him without words. He’d crossed the moonlit water meadow and opened the bolted door to the little brick-built shed straddling the chalk stream, and there she’d been, up to her thighs in the water, her cracked smile visible in the moonlight, eyes reaching for him as hundreds of pale elvers writhed and roiled around her legs.

  He became aware that Cook was staring at him.

  “Well, Amos Templebane, I’d give you a penny for them, but I haven’t got a penny on me right now. But tell you what …”

  She picked a pewter tankard off the hooks along the ceiling and then went into the room behind the forge. Amos watched until she came back and pushed it across the table to him. It was now full and had a thick head of foam on it.

  “ … give you a pint for them instead. The Smith’s Dreadnought Porter. How about that?” she said.

  He reached for the tankard and took a sip. It was cool, dark and mild, not at all as bitter as he’d been expecting: it tasted rich but not thick, with definite overtones of chocolate and toffee contrasting with a delicately bitter bite of liquorice and maybe even coffee on the aftertaste.

  Good. It’s good. Thank you.

  “Thank The Smith. Brews it himself. He’s had longer than anyone to get his brewing right, and you can taste it in every drop. You sup that and tell me why a good London boy like you doesn’t like my pie.”

  Maybe it was the warmth of the fire, or the quality of the porter, or perhaps the steady eyes of the square-built woman sitting opposite him, but Amos found he was doing something he had not done in a very, very long time.

  He relaxed.

  He relaxed and he told her about the Eel House, and the Ghost, and he even told her about the fate of the M’Gregors and his part in it, and then one thing led to another, and somewhere in the midst of it all, as he meandered back and forth from that moment, telling the middle of the story before the beginning and then jumping round to sketch the end and bring things up to the present, he found he’d eaten the pie and drunk more of the delicious porter and was now facing a wedge of steamed pudding studded with currants and swimming in a lake of custard.

  I think I’ll burst.

  “Nonsense,” she said. “But don’t eat it if you don’t want to. The others’ll be in soon and that Charlie scoffs anything he can lay his hands on and if he doesn’t get it, young Trousers has a healthy lack of shame about leftovers. But just tell me what happened at that dew pond again.”

  Hodge took the Green Man to the small copse of trees that grew close by The Folley on the windward side, facing the marshes on the other bank of the river. Although the trees had been planted for protection, it was not only from the wind: there was oak, ash and thorn, and there were two cavernous holly bushes and the old English quickbeam, also known as rowan. This late in the year, only the holly and the ivy-cloaked ruin of an ancient beech retained any leaf cover against the elements, and it was here that Hodge waited with the Green Man until Charlie reappeared with a bail of straw, a tarpaulin and a pair of thick blankets.

  Hodge sat with one comforting arm around the Green Man’s shoulders while Charlie, brought up on the road as a showman’s son and thus no stranger to the swift erection of temporary shelters, lashed off the tarpaulin and made a dry bed beneath it. The Green Man had stopped shivering by the time he finished it, calmed and perhaps warmed by Hodge on one side and Jed who leaned companionably against his legs on the other.

  “You get him any food?” said Hodge.

  “Here,” said Ida, appearing with a couple of bowls and a jug. “Cook said the beer is good for him, and there are nuts and dried fruits from her baking supplies. I brought apples as well.”

  “Just put them in the shelter,” said Hodge. “He likely don’t want to be watched while he’s eating. They’re skittish at the best of times and I reckon his poor mouth’s going to smart some from that damned stitching.”

  He helped the Green Man onto the impromptu straw mattress and looked straight at him, as if his own ruined eyes could see him clearly.

  “The food is for you, as is the shelter. You are free to take it, or not take it as you will, just as you’re free to stay or go. This is the closest we can get you to the deep green for now, but the air is fresh, these trees are old and sacred and their roots go deep. And you can smell the tang of the wildness coming off the marshland. So, as a friend—and we are friends—I sugges
t you lie up with us for a while until you get over what them bastards done to you and get your strength back. But it’s your choice.”

  He stood up and stepped away from the Green Man, who sat there looking at him mutely as he took the knife from his belt and crossed to the trees. He cut a leafless twig from an oak sapling, and similarly bare branchlets from the ash tree beside it and the blackthorn that overshadowed them both. He returned to the Green Man and put them in his hand, closing his fingers for him until he gripped them firmly. The Green Man nodded but said nothing.

  “Best I can do for now,” Hodge said. “Come rap at the door if there is anything you need. Cook in there has got a powerful lot of physick if you’re ailing, and if it gets too cold there is always a place by the fire.”

  He looked at the terrier who lay down next to the Green Man.

  “Dog’s called Jed. He reckons he’ll stay close by, if that’s fine with you. For warmth and company.”

  The Green Man blinked at him. He said nothing but nodded infinitesimally. As they walked back into The Folley, Ida nudged Hodge.

  “Jed likes him?”

  “Dog’s always had a connection with the wild, and Green Men like nature breathing round them as they sleep. And you don’t get more natural than Jed.”

  In the warmth of the forge, Amos carried on talking and Cook carried on listening and prompting him and refilling the tankard until he yawned and let his head drop onto the table and began to snore.

  She looked at him for a long moment, as if making up her mind about something. Then she took the tankard and emptied the remaining beer into the sink.

  “You heard that,” she said without turning.

  “Yes,” said Hodge, who had been leaning in the doorway behind Amos. “And I’ll tell you what …”

  “You don’t trust him?” said Cook.

  “Trust him fine, I reckon,” said Hodge. “What I was going to say was: give me that spotted dick I can smell, if there’s any left, before either of those young ’uns get their pie-hooks into it.”

  She slid the plate across to him. He pulled up a chair and dug in.