The Mysterious Case of Mr. Strangeway

by Karina Cooper

  That I lived there was testament enough.

  It was possible that this Mr. Strangeway fell under the heading of wastrel, artist or worse.

  I moved aside a second bounty—this asking the return of one Bewdy for questioning as to the nature of a missing item of value from a semi-respectable pocket—and nodded at the covered text revealed by the scrap.

  Avoid the toffs, warned the continued bounty’s note. Not unsound advice. Those in Society protected their own, until they turned on one as a matter of course. Strangeway likes the stews.

  It was not an annotation referencing a dish of any sort.

  Though I had never been there, everyone knew of the stews. Whether seeking a lady for an hour’s toss or a game of cards and coin, the stews was where a wastrel would go for whatever entertainments he might desire.

  Ergo, I thought rather cheerfully, our Mr. Strangeway was a wastrel.

  What’s more, I could visit the stews myself and locate this man. An exciting prospect. He would be an easy mark for my first collection, and the purse large enough to cement my reputation forever without resorting to assassination.

  To say nothing of the items I could purchase with such coin. I’d been meaning to acquire some back issues from Angelicus Finch’s Gazette, whose sources I could not locate myself. I’d seen a set of clear glass tubes in the window of a Chelsea shop, though Fanny wouldn’t let me stop inside. And there were books my father’s study did not already own—books written only recently, pamphlets, academic dissertations whose mention was made in the periodicals.

  I was a voracious reader, after learning the refinement of letters I’d only marginally grasped as a child, and I was insatiable, to boot.

  Of course, there was also the matter of the laudanum I took to sleep at night.

  Betsy was to be strictly monitoring how much I drank in the course of a night, yet she often forgot, and I did not always think beyond the fevers and night terrors when they struck.

  I had learned very early in our relationship that Fanny would not loosen the strings to buy more laudanum ahead of her schedule; not unless the need was dire, and for that, I would need to be bleeding, keeping her up night after night with the terrors, or failing to breathe entirely.

  There was enough in its crystal decanter for one, perhaps two more nights, yet she would not purchase more until Tuesday next. At the advice of Fanny’s own physician, no less.

  Bleeding old goat. What kind of physician failed to prescribe laudanum in this day and age?

  I was not sure I could manage past the week.

  At that thought, a shudder crept down my back—a tremor I blamed on that cold, dank station with its looming shadows and gently fluttering bits of paper. The light flickered across the wall, providing an uncanny sense of watchfulness.

  I was fortunate to be alone for my first visit. Later, when I finally crossed the path of another collector, I had already enjoyed some success and had developed a greater understanding of what it meant to be part of this disparate brotherhood. I knew to mind my tongue and let the other collector choose before I did, as a row beneath the drift for a potential pay-out was not worth the injuries that would result. Mine or his.

  And by the time I learned that bit of wisdom, I’d also learned to take the bounty posted, rather than leave it on that blackened, soot-stained wall.

  For this first adventure, I was but a novice.

  Chapter Two

  My strategy came down to the simple element of location. Mr. Strangeway, our heretofore unknown quarry, preferred the stews to polite company.

  It was possible, of course, that he was not there, now. The stews was a swath of lanes and by-ways whose greatest claim lay in the entertainments that waited along them.

  To be frank, I couldn’t cast too much blame on Mr. Strangeway for his tastes. In fact, to know that he—like me—lived in Chelsea and found himself adrift by night in London below created a sort of sympathy for his character.

  Please remember, at this age, I was more akin—in my own thoughts—to the heroine of an adventure novel, not a wealthy heiress under the scrutiny of an unforgiving Society.

  Certainly no waif ready to step into matters far beyond her understanding.

  As I walked the lanes of the stews, my head down and my collar up, my breath fogging with every cough, I considered my next step. How to find Mr. Strangeway? Could I ask?

  Would a man such as him be known so easily by name?

  What if he was friend to all the dark and dangerous creatures of the night?

  I was almost ready to talk myself out of such a straightforward commission, all because I was afraid to speak to the working women who ruffled skirts as I passed, or the men in greatcoats and fustian sleeves who laughed loudly as they shuffled from one gaming hell to the next.

  I had no plan to get inside one. My disguise would not hold under scrutiny, and I hadn’t been prepared to take a collection so quickly.

  Yet the facts were clear. I did not know what the man looked like. I couldn’t even begin to guess his favored haunt. There were many to choose from; too many, to be truthful, and therein lay its downfall. Five years later, many in the stews would close—the entertainments to be found in Limehouse would be the greater draw, and the Karakash Veil the victor in these subtle games of power.

  Though these machinations were in play, I knew nothing of them, and the stews were filled with shadows and shapes—and noises that were not all kind in the scudding smoke.

  “Lookin’ to ’come a man?” called a scratchy, hen-dry voice from my right.

  Heat filled my cheeks. As I’d said, I was no stranger to the goings-on between a man and woman—especially where coin would exchange hands along the way—but I was in no market to become a man.

  Her laughter followed me as I hurried across the narrow lane, my boots splashing in muck-ridden puddles. I could see my breath as I exhaled a harsh cough; a sound I heard mimicked now and again, but never from the doxies lining the way.

  Nor, I suspected, from the footpads who waited nearby.

  Something to do with acclimation, I thought. Those who lived in the devil fog for life would get used to its sting. Those of us who were not born below, nor ever raised in the abrasive murk, would stand out with a rasp and cough.

  A clever system, for all it came about through no effort of the lower class inhabitants.

  As I thought these things, feeling quite intellectual for figuring them out, I passed more women clad in worn coats and skirts hiked higher than they should be. I ignored more calls and teases, like cats hissing after a tumbled kitten, and I made sure to stay out of the path of any men who stumbled or strode down the lane around me.

  All of whom that I could have asked, and failed to do so.

  I would learn nothing this way.

  Seizing my courage in both gloved hands, I made for a particular woman in a crimson corset—her bosom hefted neatly above and barely contained for all she jostled them in my direction. Red as the corset under her open cotton jacket, I stumbled out a greeting.

  She laughed outright. “Look at th’ blighter,” was her return. “Poor, wee thing. Lookin’ for warmth?”

  Not in the way she suggested. Tucking my cold hands into my pockets, I shook my head. Even then, I had the sense not to speak like the uppercrust gentry Fanny had tutored into me. “Lookin’ for a toff, miss.”

  “Ain’t we all?” She laughed again, throwing back her head with its graying tendrils gleaming beneath the light. She was pretty enough, for an old bird with an impressive décolletage, but time and wear had taken most of her teeth and carved lines beside her rouged mouth. “Skiv off, then, I’m workin’.”

  “Ain’t we all,” I repeated dryly, earning a full-lipped grin. “Maybe you seen him? Cove by name of Strangeway.”

  Now, she planted her hands on her hips and faced me square. “Strange!”

  “Why?” I asked. “Someone else come about?”

  “Only them what he owes.” A snort. “Strange
is about, a slang cove in a whistle.”

  This took me a moment. According to the cant shared by most anyone who made the streets into a bit of claimed turf, slang meant fetters, the iron kind, and a whistle was the throat, to be wetted by a stiff drink. The Cockney in her words was new enough to my ears that I had some trouble following. Of all the places I’d ever been, only them what lived in earshot of the Bow Bell in Cheapside had a way of speaking that twisted the brain.

  I couldn’t figure out what she meant by slang cove in a whistle, and she did not allow me the time to work it out.

  “Always bit of coin to spare for the girls,” she was already saying, “even if he’s not always sparin’ ’em, know what I mean?” She elbowed the post beside her as if it could share in her guttural humor.

  I bared my teeth in what I hope passed for a smile. This part I could understand easy enough. Wastrel. I knew it. “Where’d he go, then? I’ve—” What was my excuse? A simple lie would suffice easy enough. “—a message for him.”

  This soiled dove with her bright red corset for all to see, she was nobody’s fool. Her gaze, erudite in ways them from above would never understand, sized me up the way I imagine she sized up any man who wandered near her. “Don’t butcher like a runner. You from the Friars?”

  I just couldn’t parse it. Butchers? Friars? “I beg your pardon?”

  “Oh, dearie me.” Now her arms folded across her chest, her chin jutted with a hint of softness about her jowls. Her eyes sparkled black in the fog-drifting light. “Mite you be, but this side a toff, if your mouth ain’t tellin’. What sorry cat died and tossed you in the low?”

  I blinked at her.

  She sighed; the same exasperated sound I often heard from Fanny. And wouldn’t my governess throw a row to hear me say so? Likened to a Cheapside prostitute, of all the nerve.

  “Right, right,” she said briskly. “‘Ere’s me, askin’ none. Strange’ll be at the Nunnery, same as he is Thursday most.”

  My smile tipped to something genuine as I patted my borrowed pockets. “Thank you right, miss. I think I’ve got—”

  “Hsst!” She waved me into silence. “A runner don’t share with a tail, not ‘less it’s worth more bread. More bread, more like we’re friends, right?” Partially right, anyway. A good informant could be invaluable, and worth more coin for it. “Friends” were not to be made lightly. She squinted one eye at me. “You after Strange’s pockets?”

  Not by design. “No, miss.”

  “Then there weren’t in it for me, is there?” Her red mouth twisted into a pout. “Won’t blow more’n I oughter, nice kinchin you are. Off wit’ you, then. The Nunnery’s just down the way, you’ll see the shingle.”

  I could have spun her about the street, but for the fact it’d cost me a coin or two. As far as my first go at asking a stranger for the whereabouts of a mark, I had imagined it progressing so much worse.

  “Thank you, miss,” I said brightly.

  “You’ll remember Red Lettie when y’need a dicky again, aye?”

  “Aye,” I promised. Not only would I remember her, but she would provide many a word—what she called a dicky bird in her nonsensical dialect—over the next year, until the fever finally allowed her the rest she never found in the streets she lived in.

  “Right. Scarp off, then.”

  It would do. Happily, I did as she suggested, scarpering off into the dark.

  There’s a talent to it, scarpering. I was better at it when I was younger, and therefore smaller, for it’s not a natural way of running for them what grow big. It is a process of motion that is one part scurrying, like a rat, and one part clinging to the shadiest bits of a path. All as soundless as possible. A body so learned could move in any street, and London’s thick fog only made it the easier.

  If only Monsieur Marceaux knew the extent to which I would put his training, he might have visited Mr. Ashmore simply to demand interest paid.

  The shingle Red Lettie spoke of was one of many dotting the lane. Some hung, such as pub signs carved with rudimentary shapes, and others were more elegantly painted. There was the Swan, the Brass Monocle, the Mad Tapper Bell, and, my personal favorite of all the names then and now, the Cardinal’s Hat.

  I would visit each over the next few months, some for curiosity and some for business, but not tonight. The shingle I searched for was not hung at all, but painted on the blackened brick. The kneeling woman in soot-smeared white could be considered praying, yet was more likely not at all engaged in an act so remotely pious.

  The Nunnery was nothing like its name suggested. No Churchman would be caught setting foot inside—at least not where any could see, and not without a fervent prayer for redemption.

  A large man stood before the narrow lane leading, I assumed, to the entry. The crumbling brick around him sported all the usual scars expected of the stews—broken casements, boarded windows, puddles gathering between cracked cobbles. Light seamed from several of the windows above, casting a shrouded, wicked yellow glow on the thick pea-souper I inhaled with every breath.

  If the Nunnery was any more or less raucous than the others, I couldn’t tell it by the noise. The stews were rarely quiet, often filled with the cat-calls of the dollymops at work, or the laughter of the carousers who stumbled from one hell to the next.

  The cove guarding the front entry didn’t look the sort to turn a blind eye to a troublemaker as I presented. With ginger whiskers at his wide jaw and narrow, inset eyes glowering at the paying customers who passed him, he seemed instead the sort who might cause a ruckus where I needed none. To get in, I would have to get past him—and then what? If Mr. Strangeway were inside, I’d then have to ask as discreetly as possible so as not to alert him to my presence.

  Was Mr. Strangeway the violent sort?

  A dubious prospect, at best. If he were one of those prodigal sons so often found in Chelsea’s inner fold, he would likely turn out to be a third son or distant relation eager to spend what coin he accrued on such flights of fancy as women and wine.

  Not at all like myself. The laudanum I took was for medicinal purposes; hadn’t the doctors assured Fanny that?

  Smiling, I edged away from the footman’s view, humming a tuneless bit under my breath. It was one of those merry little ditties I’d picked up in the company of other children like myself. In time, I would forget it—just as I’d forgotten so much to the mists of opium.

  A fair trade. A new life free of Marceaux’s threats and villainy in exchange for a few memories seemed as good a bargain as any I could have chosen.

  After all, I’d found a way to shimmy free of the bindings Fanny seemed so determined to place on me, hadn’t I?

  Feeling right clever, I avoided the main lanes in favor of the narrow tracks running between the hells. With my location firmly pinned in my mind’s eye, I navigated turns and twists and back-alley courtyards until I closed in upon the Nunnery’s secondary portico.

  With each step I took, it was as if the trappings of damp and cold fell away. I could feel the stirrings of fear and nervousness, certainly, but with it, anticipation. Eagerness. I was all but chomping at the imaginary bit for a taste of this quarry, a trail, a clue! A man, and not in any sense of the way Fanny would have demanded it. Marriage, to a girl my age, seemed so far away. I could only smother a giggle at the reversal I’d taken it.

  I sought a man, all right. But this one was not for marrying.

  Cherry St. Croix, newly minted collector, poised just beneath the casement that would lead to her first successful acquisition.

  My first victory, my first large purse, only a crack away.

  I could all but taste the bitter spice of a draught on my tongue, so sure was I that I had won this collecting game.

  And therefore, I was most surprised when a man made of metal crashed to the cobbles beside me.

  Chapter Three

  I shrieked; a sound swallowed by the echoed cacophony of cracking resin and screeching metal on brick as the figure landed more or
less upon his feet, yet fell heavily against the Nunnery’s back wall.

  In the choppy light afforded from the windows, I saw a round, bucket-shaped helmet of some kind, dulled to a lusterless finish. Bits of reflected glass glinted from where the eyes might be. Arms layered with plates of the same flat, drab color splayed against the wall, and the definitive creak of leather—likely an under-padding—accompanied his hasty straightening.

  If he counted me as anything more than a simple passer-by playing witness to his jaw-dropping entrance, I doubted it. He did not spare me much attention, and his hastily growled, “Collector’s business!”—a phrase I have long since adopted for my own use—dismissed me summarily.

  I quite expected the windows overhead to fill with gaping eyes, yet they remained empty. The noise of the Nunnery and the stews about us continued unabated.

  Wouldn’t such a thing—a metal man leaping from within—cause a stir?

  The man in question had already dusted his strange plating off and turned away when the rest of my thoughts snapped firmly into place.

  Collector’s business?

  This man in armor was a collector?

  My eyes narrowed, blood pulsing suddenly hot and aggravated in my veins.

  This collector was after my bounty!

  “Not one more step,” I demanded, reaching for the strange device affixed to his back. It looked much like a set of copper tubes, plated together under a sheet of metal, and bulky besides. I intended to halt him, yet my fingers found no purchase; less so when he quickly side-stepped my grasp and turned to face me direct.

  “Off with you, scamp,” he said, that bucket head of his turning his voice to something both tinny and growled.

  “I have collector’s business,” I returned hotly, “and you are on my mark.”