The Obsidian Dagger (Horatio Lyle)

by Webb, Catherine

  ‘Oh. Is that good?’

  ‘It’s why you’re going to wear a dress, Teresa. And ... Teresa?’

  ‘Yes, Mister Lyle?’

  ‘I couldn’t help notice how Thomas left some of his money on the kitchen table a few days ago.’

  ‘But I didn’t . . .’ began Thomas. ‘Ow!’

  ‘Sorry, lad, was that your knee? Tess - perhaps you could go and get Thomas’s money for him?’

  ‘Yes, Mister Lyle.’

  Five in the afternoon. The snow had been squashed by too many feet, and frozen as a deadly black slick across every street and between every cobble. People weren’t bothering with the bridges across the river, but just walked straight across the ice, enjoying the novelty. The fog was rising again, so heavy with suspended ice that people breathed through their scarves to stop the cold searing their lungs. The lamplighters had almost considered giving up - even if they could find the lamps, it was questionable whether their light would be seen. Each man, woman and child looked for a taper or a lantern to carry through the streets, as the dark settled again, promising a long night to come.

  And at one house overlooking the city, the doorbell was ringing. The man who answered it was a new employee, and though he had come from the highly respectable Norfolk Club with excellent references, he was still finding his feet. He didn’t really deserve what life had in store for him.

  The door opened. Mr Cartiledge looked out and saw no one. He heard an embarrassed cough at knee-height. ‘Yes, miss? May I assist you?’

  In the face that looked up at him, angelic light shone out from the deep brown eyes above a neat little blue dress. It somehow said, ‘Here be innocent charm; love it well.’

  The high-pitched voice spoke slowly, as if its owner was concentrating hard on how every syllable sounded. ‘Oh good sir, I hope I ain ... have not disturbed you but I was looking for my uncle. Is he home?’

  ‘Forgive me, miss, but who are you?’

  ‘Why, how dare you say something like that! Can you not recognize Lady Teresa of ... America? Yes, that’s right. Lady Teresa of America!’

  The disbelieving look that Cartiledge had spent many years repressing slid back across his features. ‘Of . . . North America?’ hazarded the girl. Aware that she was losing the initiative she said in a louder voice, ‘Anyway, I’m looking for Uncle Ignatius so I can give him this lovely bunch of flowers and tell him about Mummy.’ For a second, Cartiledge thought he saw a scowl and almost heard a cynical lilt in her words. But then the almost-but-not-quite angelic smile washed back over her.

  ‘I’m sorry, miss; who did you say your uncle was?’

  ‘Good old Uncle Ignatius Caryway.’ Her face fell. ‘Please, sir, I’ve come such an awful long way to see him, and I’m just a poor little girl, cruelly neglected by my family, and I’m so hungry and really . . . really . . .’ a tear welled in her eye ‘. . . miss my uncle.’ At which Teresa Hatch dropped her flowers and collapsed in tears at Cartiledge’s feet.

  At roughly the same time that Teresa Hatch was practising good elocution and better manners, Horatio Lyle stood shivering outside a warehouse by the Amber Wharves, where the busy streets were too narrow for even the smallest of carts to squeeze through. Snow had started to fall, and a cheerful demeanour was not enough to compensate for the grating cold. As he watched the street, he sang under his breath,

  London’s burning, London’s burning,

  Fetch the engines, fetch the engines,

  Fire, fire! Fire, fire!

  Pour on water, pour on water!

  He was aware of another figure lingering in the cold. Even though the figure kept itself well out of his line of sight, in the air he could see a regular puffing of breath from someone just around the corner, who hadn’t moved for as long as Lyle himself hadn’t.

  He felt a little guilty at sending the children off alone to the mansions in Hampstead; but, he told himself, better there than here.

  Lyle detached himself from the wall where he’d been leaning and started walking again, flapping his arms across each other like a startled chicken to get some heat back into his limbs. He rounded a corner into a crowded, slightly wider street, towered over by cranes and warehouses; boxes and bundles swung through the air overhead. A costermonger selling brown paper bagfuls of sugar pawed at Lyle’s arm.

  Lyle bought a bag, paid a shilling extra and said, ‘I’m looking for the beggar man Edgar. Have you seen him?’

  ‘Push off, copper.’

  Lyle stood up straighter and snapped in his officious voice, ‘I say, what’s this then? You call that weight a pound, it looks more like an ounce to me. Let’s have a feel - wouldn’t be measuring crooked, would you, not a fine, upstanding, law-abiding, helpful, I’m thinking about helpful here as one of several trouble-avoiding characteristics, citizen such as yourself?’

  The costermonger, who was a bright lad, sucked at his teeth. ‘Uh . . . Edgar . . . short cove, old, picks as many pockets with his prattle as he does with his hands, that Edgar, maybe?’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘Ain’t seen him all day.’ The costermonger turned to go, but found his path impeded by Lyle’s boot, and a heavy hand on his arm.

  ‘But if you were Edgar, and you felt nervous, where would you go?’

  Tate was snoring. It was spectacular. The snore started at the tip of his nose, which vibrated hugely like a spring in tension, then spread, rippling wave-like down his ears and back again, humming through his paws and all the way to the tip of his tail, which rose up, twitched, and relaxed again with each deep snore.

  Thomas sat in the back of a hansom cab, Tate snuggled protectively beneath his outstretched feet, and worried. It was something he was good at, inherited mostly from his mother, as his father had never felt anything in his life more than mild irritation at the consternation of being. Every now and then he glanced out of the window towards Hampstead Hill, whose mansions, comfortably above the smoke line, looked down on the city; and he worried. Thomas felt that he, not Tess, should have been the one to go up to one of those grand houses to ask about Diane Lumire; he worried too because Mister Lyle was somewhere down in the docks looking for Edgar. He worried because his parents would be back from the countryside any one of these days and they’d start asking where he’d been and why he didn’t know the ancient Greek for ‘anthropomorphic’; he worried because he knew Mrs Milner had died, having secretly read the papers Lyle had been trying to hide just after breakfast; he realized there were Things Going On that he didn’t know about; and he worried anyway because that was what Thomas did. He tried to think of Queen and Country in an attempt to calm himself down, but, unusually, it didn’t work. Under his breath he tried singing a few bars of a patriotic hymn, but found the words getting jumbled. He tried to think about anything that didn’t involve worry and, for a moment, imagined that he saw the world stretched out, the clouds all below him, his worries flown, snatched away by the speeding wind that held him up.

  Thomas let out a sigh, and leant back into his seat. It was going to be a long night.

  There was a workshop by the river, to the south of Limehouse with its workers’ clubs and belching factories, with shuttered doors and nailed-up windows, waiting to be purchased and rebuilt. Once upon a time, it had produced sloops for the navy and merchantmen making the short hop across to Holland or the French ports, but in recent years it had found itself challenged by the trend in giant metal behemoths burning coal and churning giant wheels for propulsion; so after almost two hundred years of construction, its owners had put out the lights and shut down. Rot had set into the floors, now held in place only by the ice that had frozen the planks solid, so that when Lyle made his cautious entry through a broken window his feet immediately slipped out from under him and flew upwards, depositing him on his back with the acrobatic grace of a drunken elephant.

  He staggered up with as much dignity as he could manage, and shuffled his way across the floor. Between the shattered floorboards, he could see dim lig
ht reflecting off thin ice over black water, while the floor groaned under his weight.

  ‘Hello? Edgar? Edgar, it’s Mister Lyle, are you in here?’

  A faint sound over his head, a thud like something heavy falling a long way off. ‘Edgar? It’s Mister Lyle, the nice gentleman with the available money and tactful sense of compromise?’

  He saw a staircase, looking as if most of it had been used for firewood, and edged towards it. ‘I’m coming up!’ he called, then under his breath added, ‘God help us.’

  At the foot of the staircase he heard a sudden outbreak of noise, like a stone roof falling a piece at a time on to a pile of percussion instruments, and pulled himself up the staircase, clinging for support to the open top of the floor above.

  The watery evening light trickled through the broken windows, past the ashes of a small fire that could have been made of the defrosted floorboards themselves, past a small pot of solidified porridge, past the padded boots of old Edgar, up his arm to his face. It was turned towards Lyle, with accusing pale eyes, unblinking like a fish.

  Lyle crawled up on to the floor, edged towards Edgar, and felt along his white, twisted throat for a pulse. The skin was cold, rapidly dropping to room temperature. He sat back and looked around, feeling his stomach begin to turn and his hands to itch, the cold suddenly a thing coming from inside his bones.

  A shadow moved behind him. Lyle twisted round to where it had been. But the shape that had been caught in the light, swathed in a black coat, was already bounding back down the stairs. Lyle sprang up and threw himself after it, now blind to the weakness of the floor. He heard its footsteps hammering, the wood beneath it bending, creaking and splintering as though made by not one person but twenty; in comparison his own hurried footsteps were a quiet afterthought. At the bottom of the stairs he turned, saw a figure slipping out through the broken window where he’d come in, and raced after it, ducking through the frame and out into the dull light of the wharf. The shape ran towards the river, moving with a slight stiffness, as if finding it hard to drag the weight of its own limbs.

  Lyle shouted, with a sense of futility even as he did, ‘Stop! Police!’ and was unsurprised when no one, not even the dock hands in the street behind, stopped. ‘Right,’ he hissed, and ran on. As he followed the figure towards the river the wooden walkway along the side of the workhouse became more ruinous, supported on a few struts sticking up from the frozen green mud of low tide. Swinging round a corner he saw the figure leap off the walkway on to the bed of the Thames far below, as if making the gentlest bunny hop, and heard the shattering of ice.

  Lyle peered down, and made out the shape darting under the shadow of the walkway and into the mess of wooden struts and pillars, and frozen mud banks smelling of rot beneath the dockside buildings. Black water crawled through the shattered indent in the ice where it had landed. He cursed, slithered down off the edge of the walkway until he hung by his fingertips, and let go, feet sliding from beneath him as he dropped on to the ice. Getting back up was like catching a giant wet bar of soap while covered in grease; then keeping his balance was like trying to cycle with a cat on one handlebar, and a giraffe on the other. Lyle made for the support of a pillar and looked around for the figure.

  He saw a black coat lying on the ice and slithered towards it. It was heavy, lined with red silk, and had the shortness and tight waist of a lady’s garment. The pockets were empty. He let it drop and turned to look for the figure.

  Something caught his eye, standing on the ice, in a last outbreak of sunlight.

  Lyle edged towards it.

  The thing was a head shorter than him, off-white, and cold to the touch. One arm was raised in the direction of the sun, shielding its closed stone eyes; the other was stretched to one side as if to keep the thing’s balance. It was the statue of a fashionably dressed woman, with a tight face, all bones and skin, set in a cruel little smile. Lyle made his way past it, into the shadow of the wharves, then out on to the ice of the river itself, where the narrow passage of open water was shrinking almost visibly in the cold.

  There was no sign of the fleeing figure. Lyle edged back into the shadows of the wharf, and knelt again by the coat, rummaging once more through its pockets, as much for something to do as in the hope of finding anything. All the while his mind raced. He was being, he felt fairly sure, stupid. Something obvious was happening, and he was refusing, without his knowing, refusing to see what it could be.

  Lyle reached a decision. It was, he knew, totally irrational, but he had to check. He got up and slithered his way back towards the marble statue of the woman, standing in pale sunlight on the ice.

  To where the marble statue of the woman had been. To where the marble statue wasn’t standing any more.

  Horatio Lyle turned this way and that, mouth opening and closing in surprise and dismay. He stopped, controlled himself, and tried to think logical, sensible thoughts, while the sun crawled its way beneath the smoke-drowned horizon, and the body of old dead Edgar, in the abandoned building above, slowly dropped to the temperature of its surroundings.

  Thomas woke, and immediately felt guilty, but that was normal: he felt guilty about most things all the time. That was fine; guilt was all part of responsibility, he told himself. He became aware of the cold, pouring through the cab like rising night-time fog. Then he felt a momentary spurt of fear, slow to arrive as the brain suddenly questioned what on earth he was doing here anyway, with Tate snoring peacefully under his feet, outside another mansion on another street that, in this part of town, looked like all the rest.

  Fear briefly flared into terror as he realized he was not alone. A shape sat by him, a large hat pulled down over its eyes, hands buried under its armpits, legs crossed and stretched out in front of it, breathing low and steady. Thomas gave an instinctive ‘Eek!’ making both him and the figure jump.

  Mister Lyle woke up. ‘What? Who?’ He saw Thomas, and relaxed. ‘Oh. What is it?’

  ‘Mister Lyle!’ Thomas squeaked.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You’re . . . here?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Erm . . . when did you get here?’

  ‘About half an hour ago.’

  ‘And was your visit to the docks successful?’

  A flicker on Lyle’s face, the slightest hesitation. ‘I . . . didn’t find Edgar, I’m afraid.’

  Thomas opened his mouth to speak, then noticed something in Lyle’s face and voice that made him reconsider.

  Lyle checked the watch in his pocket. ‘Past your bedtime. Where’s Tess?’

  There was a sound outside. A crunching of snow underfoot and a hasty pounding of footsteps, then a shadow moved in the fog. A second later Tess’s shining red face appeared in the cab doorway. ‘Coo-eee! Mister Lyle! You back from the docks then?’

  ‘Yes, Teresa,’ said Lyle as she climbed inside, feet stepping on feet with blind carelessness. ‘And how has your day been? Was this house of any use in finding Lady Lumire?’

  ‘It were all right,’ she said, opening up a bundle on her lap. ‘An’ the one before. There was this man what was called Cartil . . . there was this butler-type person an’ he said how I was a “poor neglected waif ” an’ how I clearly weren’t looked after right an’ . . .’

  ‘Did you get anything useful?’ said Lyle impatiently.

  ‘I got,’ Tess examined her bundle, ‘three apples, a loaf of hot bread, a packet of tea, four shillings, half a plum pudding, half a bottle of brandy an’ a pair of woolly socks.’

  ‘I’ll take the brandy,’ said Lyle, grabbing it. ‘You never know when ethyl alcohol will come in handy.’

  Tess stared at him with the look of one on the edge of a profound revelation. ‘Mister Lyle, you ain’t never been normal, ’ave you?’

  ‘Teresa, haven’t I always taught you that generalizations within a subjective group context can never be accepted as theory? I suppose we’ll have to try the next mansion and -’

  ‘She ain’t there.’

&nbs
p; ‘Pardon?’

  Tess was halfway through the plum pudding. ‘This Diane Lumire lady ain’t there. The butler said how she’d recently moved into this big house up on the hill after the old owner got arrested for conspir . . . for stuff, an’ how she’d sent a card round introducing herself as the new bigwig an’ he gave it to me ’cos his bigwigs were going to go an’ meet this lady person tonight at this big gathering for bigwigs, but how they’re off in this place what has lotsa things with big . . . goes on the head, all pointy . . .’

  ‘Horns?’

  ‘Yes, them with them horns.’

  ‘Deer?’

  Tess bounced up and down. ‘Of course it’s deer, nitwit! I just said, didn’t I?’

  ‘Teresa,’ said Lyle in a voice so reasonable it crackled round the edges, ‘I appreciate the effort you’ve been to and accept that you really are a wonderful . . . character . . . but you’re also heading for a thick ear. Did he know which house?’

  ‘He gave me a map,’ said Tess smugly. ‘But I ain’t givin’ it until we talk about how I’m all neglected an’ how dom ... domes . . . home violence ain’t the right way in how you should . . .’

  ‘Teresa!’ barked Lyle.

  She didn’t even blink. ‘. . . ’cos you know you’re my favourite not-normal person ever, Mister Lyle, an’ I’ve always looked up to you ’cos of the science and the thinkin’ thing an’ here you go, Mister Lyle. Hope it’s all right an’ all.’ A thought struck her. ‘You find that Edgar bloke what was in the docks?’

  ‘He’s all right, Teresa,’ said Lyle, not quite meeting her or Thomas’s eye, and there it was, the sick feeling in Thomas’s stomach. ‘He’s ... got nothing to worry about, I think. Just a false alarm.’

  He turned to study Tess’s map, with a look of forced concentration. His eyes widened even as his eyebrows sank.