Engraved: Book Five of The St. Croix Chronicles (14 page)

My life in exchange for Adelaide’s, was it?

The Veil was desperate to find me; an unusual truth I had not thought pinned so firmly on me, but on what I represented. Was it simply to murder me?

I
will have my tiger returned!

Yes. I imagine the truth was not so complex after all.

I fled down the hall, into the small kitchen, and tore the lock open. A terrible crack of wood and crashing thud behind me warned the Veil’s men had not taken the lack of welcome as a deterrent, and I hesitated only briefly.

Would Piers be all right?

He would have to be. Surely not even the Veil would lay hands on an earl—especially the Marquess of Northampton’s last remaining son.

Holding my breath, I ran out into the cramped lane between this rowhouse and the one behind, and left the earl to his own consequences.

At least he’d given me the opportunity to escape. I recognized that for what it was. He could not be accused of hiding me, and at the same time, I could not say that he did not in some small way help.

And he thought his mistress possessed a manipulative mind.

Chapter Ten

Escaping the men who came to collect me at the Veil’s behest was entirely too easy. Making my way through Limehouse without a hue and cry much less so.

I was not so foolish as to let down my guard, but there were only so many paths that one could attempt, and each proved to be watched by the Veil’s new favored hounds.

The Black Fish Ferrymen infested the district, and my luck was not so long-lived that I could avoid them entirely.

The hue and cry rose less than an hour into my flight, and weariness was beginning to take its toll. My throat had become something of a ragged burn, overly sensitive to the fog I breathed in as I darted lane to lane, road to road and between structures that provided little enough shelter for moments of peace.

To think that most I passed continued to behave as I was certain they always did, even whilst full grown men chased an urchin across the bloody whole. I lived quite the surreal life, and this without the duality of Society’s aether-guided gondolas or alchemy’s interventions.

By the time I made it to the edge of Limehouse proper, I counted no less than fourteen Ferrymen, and three I’d recognized from the Menagerie.

One looked strikingly like the man in work overalls I’d seen the night prior when Ashmore and I had played our little drama.

The Ferrymen were among the nastiest of the gangs already, dabbling in all matters from wares to forced flesh; to know they’d allied with the Veil worried me. The stakes, still unknown, seemed to culminate in the increase of reach and labor. When the Veil had simply relied on their own reputation—and the uncanny loyalty of its own Chinese people—it had been dangerous enough.

The Footmen were among the meanest of the low pads, and recalling the ease with which they pulled pistols and irons spoke of a greater conflict at hand. One that had certainly been brewing long enough to spill over at the slightest provocation.

I had thought to wait to visit Ishmael, but now I wasn’t certain I could afford to be so patient. If he were not in immediate danger at this moment, I worried that he would be soon.

Lord Piers’s words had been dire.
The Veil has marked every person you knew.

How far? How deep did they delve in their efforts to find me?

Had they found Fanny? My staff?

Bleeding martyrs and the Devil’s own, what in the name of all things reasonable was I meant to do?

I found shelter within the vee of a ramshackle tenement known for the cheapest doxies outside the worst of the stews. Gasping for breath, I leaned back against the rotting wood and tipped my face to the rapidly darkening ambience. It couldn’t be all that late into the afternoon, but the fog choked off light like a creeping vine destroyed all life, and the lamplighters were already making the rounds.

Darkness might help my cause, but it could hinder if I wasn’t cautious.

All my concerns for those I cared for would be worthless if I were caught here.

I could think of only one safe place to go.

In the long and storied history of the London railway, tracks had been laid and abandoned, utilized and discarded, leaving rail stations to wither and rot. Not all that far from where I rested—perhaps ten minutes’ sprint if I could resolve my flagging energies—one such station squatted.

Many years back, it had provided a bustling rail station for use of London low’s working residents. When Parliament redrafted the lines, the station was abandoned, and none had ever claimed it.

Well, none had claimed it openly. I had never known who owned it, or who maintained it, but this station had become the heart of the collectors’ headquarters.

I’d learned of it one bored afternoon at a Society luncheon, and thus began my collecting profession.

Collectors by nature were a wary sort, as one must be when coin could be competed for, but they were also afforded a great deal more respect than most. When a profession allowed one to escape many aspects of the law in pursuit of a bounty, even if such antics were not openly accepted by said law, one learned how to spot a collector in the street.

I had been visible enough, masked as I was behind goggles I’d made myself for use in the fog and a respirator to breathe freely through, and scarce were the footpads who thought it a lark to take on a collector. The few times I had come across other collectors at the station, we had not spoken but afforded each other wary courtesy.

The station was not for others to visit. Collectors only, and God help the fool who wandered in, for no one else would.

The only trouble, aside from reaching it, was that I did not look like a collector. Apart from my sex, which was telling enough, I lacked those accouterments that collectors tended to exhibit. The goggles that had served as my fog-preventatives, the respirator made to mold over my mouth and nose and allow for easy breathing in the dense smoke, had served a dual purpose. Certainly, they made collecting easier, but they also marked me as one of them what prowled the fog in search of quarry. This unwitting lapse might lead to a brawl to prove myself if anyone else was about.

I scrubbed at my face, knowing I only smeared more grit about in the sweat coating my skin, and took a deep breath to ease the pain in my chest.

Given rational thought, I understood that this was not the worst predicament I had ever been in. I knew these streets, I had a place to hide—if I could only get there—and it wasn’t as though Piers had trussed me up and delivered me to the Veil.

Of course, I had questions in need of answers, and there were few I could ask. For starters, I needed to wait out the Ferrymen, then locate Ashmore—although I fully expected him to locate me, for he had an uncanny ability to do just that. I wasn’t positive he utilized alchemy to do it. The gentleman had wonderful acumen.

The shouting and sense of urgency that had dogged me thus far had faded, leaving me mired in the thrum I associated with the usual activities of them what lived below the drift.

I wasn’t so foolish as to assume I could stroll deeper into the East End without fear, but at least I’d earned something of a respite.

The entirety of my day felt consumed by running. I was, to put it mildly, beyond weary of it.

And to think that I had rather subconsciously thwarted the Veil’s many schemes over the past year. Certainly, original events had not been entirely on purpose. I wished I could go back to my younger self and warn her to pay closer attention to the games she played.

I might not have made different decisions, but at least I could enjoy the frustration inflicted on the criminal organization that hunted me now.

A rapid beat of footsteps thudded down the lane just beside my hiding place, and I shrank back into the dark and discomfort provided. They did not hurry past, but slowed, jarring my heart into an uneven beat.

I held my breath lest the sting of it force me to cough, giving away my location.

I could see little more than a narrow band of shrouded light, and that would quickly fade.

“Where’s th’ downy bitch?” demanded a rough voice, unfamiliar and low class.

I wrinkled my nose.

“Nowt but deadlurk ‘at way,” replied another. This one was higher in octave, but nasal and tinted by cant closer to Haymarket than here. Too mean for the Scavengers, then. That loose gang preferred an abram’s calling to that of the Ferrymen’s more physical leanings. “Bloody pricks’n plums, can’t see’n this particular.”

The
particular
was something of a less than affectionate moniker for the peasouper we all slogged through. The London Particular to be precise, although this one didn’t sound as though he were the sort to give a toss about such matters as proper noun use.

“Commat,” snarled the other. “Leave it t’the dogs.”

As the heavy tread of two men passed my hiding place, a flicker of black silhouettes briefly framed by sickly yellow fog, I pondered the meaning of
dogs
. It wasn’t often a word of respect, but the manner in which he’d said it conferred something like confidence.

Had the Ferrymen a new ranking within its hierarchy?

I couldn’t imagine what the dogs would be. In most cases of cant, anything labeled a dog was sure to be worth less than the play-acting insanity of the abram man. Then again, perhaps them what favored such casual violence were just that.

When no sign of the Ferrymen lingered, I eased my way out from the cramped corner. I squinted left, then right, and saw little more than swirling streaks of black and yellow. I missed my fog-preventatives fiercely. I’d built them with a yellow lens in one eye, so that I might see more clearly than most. The color disparity allowed me sharper visual acuity, especially since the fog tended to reflect light and make it worse.

As I carefully made my way across the Limehouse border, the sonorous tones of the Westminster bells rang thrice.

To think that only half a year ago, it would have been tolling out the third hour past midnight. Now it warned me that it was merely three in the afternoon, for all it was rapidly turning to gloom and dusk, and I felt unaccountably old to be wandering so early in the day.

At least there was no one to chase me as I hunched my shoulders, lowered my soot-streaked head, and forged my way deeper into the East End.

Chapter Eleven

By the time I’d traversed the streets and made my way to the old, crumbling station abandoned in the fog, darkness had well and truly fallen. I was exhausted beyond measure, with feet throbbing and limbs wearied. The sweat of my excursions had combined to turn the filth coating my face into an itchy mask.

I’d lost more than my fog-sense; I’d gone and grown accustomed to all-day cleanliness while in Ashmore’s company.

Perish the thought.

With the setting of the sun somewhere beyond all the choking miasma, the districts I navigated slowly changed its residents. The working class melded away to homes they were fortunate enough to possess, retiring to supper or an opportunity to get off wearied limbs. Some skipped supper altogether and visited the taverns and bars that supported the underbelly of London’s lower classes.

That left me, a wayward collector with neither attire nor evidential proof, and them what crept into the burgeoning dark.

Perhaps it was credit to my imagination that I began to consider more deeply the consequences of my alchemical knowledge when there was no longer any daylight to fend away the shadows. Perhaps I found more in common with the nighttime creepers than I did the daily world with its everyday lives.

The abandoned station hunkered in the dark, filthy windows smeared with grime to damp the faint glow of a lamp kept lit within. In what spirit of kinship we possessed, he who found the single lamp at its lowest topped the oil—the smallest of payment for a profession kept in order by use of the collecting wall.

I strode inside the station, knee-high in a blackened swell of fog. It danced and tumbled in my wake, like ghosts cavorting in a murky pool. The station bent both left and right, the latter being where the platform had once stood.

Collectors turned left for the wall. All else turned right for ignorance of the crumbled trap the station platform had become.

Whoever maintained it did so with very little fuss. Notes were scribed by them what provided the bounties, and placed by some keeper or another. The whole became a wall of parchment of various heft and color, some waxy and others fine.

Those of us who claimed a bounty did so by peeling the note off the wall. Some with greater aspirations of conflict left it in place, hoping for a run-in with a rival and a bit of a wager wrought in blood.

Only one had ever directly challenged fellow collectors, and only in matters of murder or assassination.

As I forged my way through mist and dark, a silhouette painted in murky gold drifted into sight.

My heart lobbed into my throat so hard that the whole of my body lurched with it. I stumbled on nothing at all, fingers clenched over the borrowed coat as my senses turned that shadow to a thin fellow with a large greatcoat and a bowler pulled low.

A strangled sound captured in my chest echoed eerily in the collector’s station, bounced from brick wall to brick wall and was swallowed by the fog.

The figure turned.

Where I expected to see a blade of a nose and lazy smile, there was a flat, wide nose, a bullish jaw, and thick lips set in a scarred finish. He wasn’t nearly as tall as my imagination painted him, nor so thin, and extremely square shoulders beneath his fustian coat bore the breadth of a pugilist.

My fear—my nightmares—eased with a hiss of air, and the tremors followed after. There was no chance, no matter how slim a miracle, that I might ever face my rival, my friend, again. He was gone. As surely as I still stood, he did not.

It was a burden I carried, a memory I tucked with the ghost of my husband, and for the sake of them what I had lost—friend or rival, husband or standing—I could not allow the nightmares purchase.

I braced my shoulders lest their slump translate through coal-smeared dark and my too-large coat. Weakness was as blood to predators when dealing with a collector; I had to be certain to show none.

Signs I had missed in my panic made themselves clearer as I approached the wall on soundless feet. He wore a common dock man’s cap, not a bowler, and his jaw was both wide and made to look soft by the bulldog-like jowls dusted by dark blond whiskers. He had large eyes spaced widely apart, color indistinguishable in the dark, and they fixed on me with uncompromising suspicion.

A glance at his attire revealed that it was not all shoulder beneath his navy coat, but leather padding and strange gauntlet vanishing into his sleeve. A like padding fastened around his chest and mid-section.

If I kicked it, it would likely absorb much of the impact.

Decidedly a collector.

And here I stood, utterly underdressed for the occasion.

I only pretended to ignore him as I closed the distance between us. His gaze remained fixed upon me as I strode to his side; shoulder to elbow, really, for like most, he was taller than I.

Studying the wall revealed the usual run of collection notices. Them what owed money, them what had vanished with someone else’s belongings, items of note needed finding, and other such errands that were too dangerous or too complicated for someone else to bother with.

More than one bore a notice that a dead collection was acceptable if a body could not be turned in alive. Few of those were matters of debt, however. One could not wrest coin from a corpse.

In my many years as collector, there had usually been at least one assassination on the wall at any time. My rival—whose name I refused to give out of respect for the friend he had been first—had delighted in such notices, and sliced each in marked challenge to any collector who felt bold enough to take him on.

I’d used that same ego against him, challenging him direct to find Jack the Ripper before I did—using a monster to bait a monster.

It had worked—at least partially.

I cleared my throat. “Been no sign of that Ripper, eh?”

The collector grunted. “Not since November.” A grudging reply, but I sensed truth in it. I’d thought the monster my first real killing—as a rule, I had never collected children nor taken on assassinations. There were some men who simply needed killing, and the world might thank them what holds the knife, but the thought still left me with an acute discomfort.

I’d murdered, and it had done something to my inside self I hadn’t quite come to terms with. A loss of innocence, maybe, if I were feeling particularly romantic about it.

And for all of fate’s tossing about, I’d learned that I hadn’t quite managed to finish the job. The November papers had declared another murder while I was convalescing in the country.

None since.

I did not know if the murderer was still about, but to go near on half a year without sign nor trace suggested he was gone for good.

Whether I’d injured him badly enough that he’d succumbed after that final murder he’d committed or if he’d fled London entirely, I couldn’t know.

“Shame,” I murmured.

“Good coin in it,” he agreed, misunderstanding what was so shameful. He thought I missed the purse. If only that were so. “Maybe the collector what likes the killin’s took ’im on.”

“Mm.” Noncommittal at best, but I chose not to share what I knew on that regard. I’d earn no favors by confessing to killing a fellow collector, even if it was something of an unwritten rule to compete. “Been months after his last twist? Wager he’s gone.”

“No bet,” he demurred, likely thinking the same as I. We would never know until the Ripper struck again, an unfortunate circumstance, but all of London had moved on. Whitechapel no longer spoke of the terror that haunted its streets from September to November.

No, three months of five murders and then nothing at all?

I may not have killed him outright, but my instincts assured me that he was gone. One way or another.

And I had much more important matters than revisiting such unhappy memories. I frowned at the various bits of parchment, squinting at the cramped writing of some.

“‘Ere, now,” the gruff bloke said suddenly. He flattened a scarred hand on the wall in front of my face. “Y’a collector or just lookin’ about where y’ain’t t’be?”

I was tired, true. Fatigued, really, from the physical aches of a weary body to the mental strain of a day that would not cease its continued assault. I could have grabbed his wrist, if I’d wanted, kicked out the knee he put much of his weight on to stoop to my level, knocked him on his arse, then stepped on his throat for added punctuation.

I could have done all this just as it played out in my head, but the whole of it seemed too much effort for a point to make.

So I smiled at him instead; full, toothy and utterly lacking in anything kind. “I do this dance with every one o’ you blighters calling me into question.” I roughened my dialect, for the only known female collector was not a toff.

He had thick eyebrows—bushy as I imagined his whiskers would get if he didn’t shave every few days or so. They drew together over his flattened nose. “What, y’ sayin’ yer ‘er?” He snorted. “Don’t look it.”

“Thought I’d be taller?” I asked, dismissively letting my gaze return to the wall. Another batch of parchment, a little nicer than some, caught my eye. They were pinned close enough to suggest they’d come at the same time, overlapping each other.

“Thought yeh’d—aye,” he said, snorting again. Habit or bad case of watery lung, I didn’t know. “It true y’collected Jauncey Copperpot?”

“That weren’t even his real name,” I said absently, ducking under his confining arm as if it were nothing. I pinned a finger to the note, my teeth coming together.
Communion
.

Pricks and plums
, to borrow a nicely turned bit of cant.

“An’ ’is beaters?” prodded the collector.

I sniffed over my shoulder. “Nothing a twist or two wouldn’t solve.” Bracing my hand over the notes to hide the names from my odd interrogator, I lifted the note and surveyed the next.
Zylphia.

Naturally.

The last two beside it threw all my flagging energies into abrupt reverse.

Countess Compton
,
also known as Cherry St.
Croix
.

Miss Black
,
collector.

Dead or alive. Each posted by the Midnight Menagerie.

“Bollocks,” I breathed.

“Sommat good?” queried the collector, and I tore the four notes from the wall before he saw them. The glare I shot him warned of my claim.

He raised his hands as though to indicate surrender, his thick lips hiked in a scarred twist. “Y’saw’m first, ain’t lookin’ fer a fight.” A glance over my black hair and mud-caked boots lifted a corner of his mouth. “Not that y’look like yeh’d stan’ up.”

I scowled. “Better men’ve made the same call.”

“Heh.” He scratched at his temple, leather at his gut creaking. “Thought’cha was a story.”

“There’re some who’d wish it,” I said, stuffing the crumpled notes into my coat pocket. I scraped a filthy hand over my cheek, as a brawler might in show of attitude, and added, “You want to be one?”

“Neh. I get my plen’y.” He stepped aside, as much a show of goodwill as to get closer to the wall and the bounties left. “I’ll tell you sommat ’fore y’go.”

I tilted my head. “What?”

“They leave us alone when they’re ‘round, but I got me thinkin’ they won’t do th’same fer a haybag,” he said by way of preamble, and it took me a moment to recall the word for what it was. This bloke came from outside the East End. West End, more than not, another by way of Haymarket.

I let the descriptor go. “Who?”

“The Black Fish Ferrymen.”

I scoffed. “They’re a bunch of magsmen and mug-hunters,” I said, “I’ll grant you that, but even they won’t creep on collector ground.”

He sucked air through his teeth, shaking his head as he turned his eyes to the notes that promised a good meal on a good day. “Used t’be,” he replied. “Used t’be.”

He didn’t seem inclined to say anything else—duty more than discharged, and likely because I was female than for any collector’s camaraderie. “Grateful,” I told his back. He snorted.

Clutching my notes in the fist I’d thrust into my pocket, I left the leather-banded fellow to his perusal.

So the Ferrymen weren’t just encroaching in Limehouse. That sealed it. Something had given them an edge—a dramatic leverage over all comers. Nothing else could explain the ease with which they crossed boundaries they had not before, and even so far as to harass the collectors.

That was highly unheard of. For all the Menagerie’s reach, they had only acted as providers of bounties when they needed debts collected. They had never flexed any muscle over collector business, and to learn the Ferrymen had no such cares was the last straw.

They had a swagger, they always did, but such recklessness demanded a backer.

The Veil was moving.

Confound it. I could no longer put off a meeting with Communion. Of all my sources, he’d have the best information on the Ferrymen proper. Whatever he could tell me, I could merge with what I’d learned of the Veil’s actions and perhaps find a weakness—or the truth of whatever it was bolstering the Ferrymen.

I might also gain an idea of how many collectors had a notice with my descriptor.

Did the Society collectors know? There were only three that I knew of, lazy fellows who thought it a stylish sort of profession for the fashionably dangerous. They relegated themselves to roles of pretend authority, usually among the higher middle class and tradesmen of their purview.

I was the only true collector in the lot, but they wouldn’t know that. Would they take on a countess? Unlikely.

Would they come for a disgraced countess?

The purse was good enough. I would.

Of the four notices plucked, the one for my collecting self and the one for Ishmael Communion would surely give more pause than challenge. Communion was no small fish in the Brick Street Bakers, physically or otherwise. He was a large man, as tall as Osoba but at least three times his breadth. A watchmaker’s son, he possessed a remarkable grasp of the Queen’s English for a ranking officer in a low street gang, and an intelligence few would make the mistake of underestimating.

When first I’d met him, he’d been a cracker of some repute, and a master rum dubber. What he taught me was what they called the black art—how to pick a lock like a virtuoso. I’d worked with him on occasion, and we’d pulled each other out of the proverbial fire more than once.