Kitty Peck and the Child of Ill-Fortune (31 page)

She waved the opium stick in front of her face, so I caught the tang of it in my nose.

‘It is a cruel death, but there are worse. Go now and remember what I have said.’

I never thought that sitting in a carriage with Lady Ginger would seem like an appealing way to spend an evening, but now it came to it, I didn’t want to leave her. I stared at the men and the torches again and felt my heart racket off the cage of my ribs.

‘You must go, Katharine. They will be waiting.’

I pulled my skirts together and moved to the edge of the seat. I reached for the leather strap hanging above the door to steady myself and turned back to my grandmother.

‘Where are we? I’m here now, so I may as well know from you.’

Lady Ginger’s black eyes slid to the flame-lit gateway visible through the open carriage door. She took a deep, shuddering breath.

‘Smithfield has always been a place of blood. The Barons of London have gathered here for nearly seven hundred years. You are about to be inducted into one of the oldest guilds of the City at their ancient church. St Bartholomew the Great.’

The door slammed shut behind me. I whipped about but the carriage was already moving away. I watched until it turned a corner, clutching the handle of my bag so tight my knuckles cracked aloud. I turned back to the archway. The men with the torches were watching. I walked slowly towards them and paused when I was level. They both dipped their heads and the one on the left nodded the way through.

A line of torches glowing beyond the arch marked the way. I went through, hearing my feet echo from the stones that fanned overhead. It was a gatehouse leading to a path through a churchyard. On the left torches set into a high bank made my shadow flicker over the wall on the right, like there were two of us walking towards the open door.

The flames threw the building into shadow. I was aware of the bulk of it looming over me, but I couldn’t see it clear. I knew where I was – Smithfield Market and the hospital were close by – but I’d never been to the church before.

A single bell sounded the hour. It wasn’t the bell at St Bartholomew’s, the sound came from somewhere else. In a moment a dozen bells went off, all of them clanging just the once as the City marked the first hour of May Day in ragged time. Oranges and Lemons – that was their song, wasn’t it? Joey and me sang it as kids. It was a pretty tune. I ran it through my head as I paused at the black doorway and then I wished I hadn’t.

‘Late.’

The voice came from the darkness inside the doorway.

‘You are late. The session begins on the stroke of one. You have already disappointed us. Follow.’

Footsteps sounded on stone, the crisp clipped rapping growing fainter as the man moved deeper into the church. I tried to steady my breathing as Madame Celeste had taught me. It was a cold night, but under my dress something trickled between my shoulder blades and snaked down my back. Beneath the buttoned leather my palms sweated round the handle of my bag.

I looked up at the stars glittering in the clear sky – thousands of brilliant-cut gemstones scattered across a jeweller’s cloth.

Cold and hard as a diamond
.

I stepped inside.

The smell came first. Mice, must and centuries of dust and damp. There was a bit of incense there too – a ghost of it anyways. It made me think of Misha – that sharp cologne of his. I pushed the thought away but the trace of him lingered.

Incense – at least it would have made Lucca feel homely. I wished he was here.

I was standing in a stone lobby. Ahead, a crack of light divided a pair of heavy curtains. I went forward and pushed them aside. I was at the right-hand side of the church. Five foot in front of me a dozen lighted candles sprouted from a metal tree, dripping wax and light into a pool on the stones. They lit up a ledgerstone set into the flags. The name and dates were unreadable. Centuries of butchers’ boots, most likely, had worn them away, although I doubted many of them were regulars now. The Smithfield men I knew were more likely to worship at The Old Red Cow.

I moved to the right. I couldn’t see the rest of the church from where I stood on account of the wide columns blocking the view. The sound of my heels catching on the stones came too loud. I tried to walk dainty, but of an instant the echo of my boots was drowned by voices – men’s voices speaking together, almost like a chant, only not as musical.

As I rounded the pillar to stand at the far end of the aisle, a span of rounded black arches marched away from me on either side. Halfway down more candles burned in brackets set on the columns and on the arms of floor-standing metal trees set between the arches. The voices came again. One man called a question and others answered.

‘Do you bring news, brothers?’

‘Aye, we do.’

‘Is your parable clothed in truth?’

‘Aye, it is.’

I walked towards the sound. As I moved deeper into the church I began to make them out. Dark figures holding lighted tapers stood just inside the arches leading up to and circling round the altar. I couldn’t see them all, but I counted the flames. Eleven – there were eleven of them.

As I came level with the first man I stopped. He was old and finely dressed. Sparse grey hair fell to the collar of his floor-length coat. He glanced over at me and his lips curved into a smile beneath his long nose. He inclined his head, but he didn’t miss his place in the chant.

‘Are you faithful to the brethren?’

‘Aye, we are.’

‘Would you lay down your life for a brother?’

‘Aye, and our soul if called.’

‘Will you walk in silence from this place?’

‘Aye, and to the grave.’

‘It is finished.’

The church was peaceful for a moment and then the voice that led the chanting came again.

‘And so, at last, the newest of our number has come among us.’ I felt nearly a dozen pairs of eyes turn upon me.

‘Come forward. Your place is to the right – the darkened space. It will remain shadowed this evening until you are proven. Take your position.’

I paused for a moment not understanding where I should go. The man who’d dialled me first moved his taper a little, inclining it towards a dark archway just down from the altar. I nodded to him – at least he seemed friendly – and walked up the centre of the aisle.

They watched in silence.

I don’t know what I expected the Barons to look like. I hadn’t imagined any of them to be my age, that’s for certain. Mostly they were ancient – bald heads, grey heads, hair in unlikely places. Shrivelled and bent, with eyes like jack stones held in string pouches – eyes that scraped my body from the top of my hat to the hem of my skirt.

But one of them, standing three arches along from the first man to notice me, was a good deal younger than the rest. He was tall, dark and not five years older than me, I’d say. He nodded as I passed and I felt his eyes on my back as I carried on.

Two men stood beneath the next arch on the left. I paused for a moment. We were to come alone, weren’t we? Then why . . .

‘Proceed to your place.’ The voice echoed again.

I quickened my step, aware of a wheezing sound as I passed the final arch before my allotted space. The air was suddenly foul – thick with sweat and worse. I glanced to the right. The man sitting, rather than standing there, almost filled the gap.

I say man, but he was more like a mound of flesh. He was so vast he couldn’t even wear normal gear. Instead, his body seemed to burst from a dark gown that pooled on the stones around him. His head looked ridiculous balanced on a roll of pallid flesh that had once been a neck. He was so wide that his arms stuck out at an odd angle, propped aside on obscene ridges of fat. Like his head, the arms looked absurdly small. A lighted taper was clutched in a child-like fist at the end of one of them. He smiled at me and his eyes almost disappeared into the folds of his face.

I looked away and took up my place. I stood in the shadow, trying to block my nose to the stench rolling off the walrus. I could still hear him breathing, though. It sounded wet, like he was slurping soup from a saucer. If I could hear him, I was sure he could hear me. My heart was beating so fast and so hard that I could feel it flutter in my throat.

‘We will begin the parables.’

There was a movement behind the altar and a man backed into view.

I couldn’t quite make him out because of the stone table in the way. He stretched his arms into the shadows and another man stepped out. Still with his back to me, the first man led the second round the altar table, guiding him down the steps, until they were both at the centre of the nave. The first man, tall he was and broad with it, bent to whisper something and ducked to the side. I watched him disappear behind the altar again and into the arched shadows.

Now I saw why the second man needed guiding. He was blind as a stone – his eyes glazed over with a milky film. He stood completely still for a moment and then he turned slowly towards me, like he knew exactly where I was. He seemed to stare at me, although I knew that couldn’t be true. The angular face was carved like a marble statue on an old church monument. It was completely still, too – bland and expressionless like one of them plaster masks that still hung over the arch above the stage of The Comet.

The man’s narrow nose was crooked and his high forehead was interrupted in the middle by a pointed widow’s peak that carried his thick hair off to the right in a blunted wave that curled below his ear.

Excepting for his sleek black coat, there was no colour to him at all. His skin and his hair were like bleached cotton.

He nodded at me. ‘Greetings, brother. We would not expect you to lead the parables tonight.’

I realised it was the man who led the chanting I’d heard at the beginning. He turned back to the church and raised his hands, spreading them wide.

‘I, Lord Kite . . .’

I started as the Beetle’s words scuttled through my head –
The most dangerous among them is Lord Kite – remember that, Kitty.

‘. . . of Temple, first of the chapters of London, do offer my parable prepared in good faith for this day, the first of May, 1881, the Vernal session . . .’

As I finished up, I knew I’d done well. My grandmother and the Beetle might even have been proud, I thought, as I scanned the faces turned towards me. I had the lingo now. I’d heard it over eleven times, enough to take in all the patter.

The bastards.

Truly, I never knew such evil was walking the streets of London until I heard the Barons listing their assets and running through their business like they were checking the stock in a smart haberdashery. Murder to order, children, violence, beatings, robberies, blackmail, arson, even treason – name a crime and at least one of them was happy to reel it off like he was offering his grandmother’s recipe for elderflower cordial.

At the heart it was all about bodies – the quick and the dead – traded from London to Timbuktu. People bought and sold like apples on a market stall. If they had a mind to it, they’d turn Paradise and everyone in it inside out without a second thought. Jesus! And I’d thought my grandmother was a heartless bitch.

The Barons was toffs, most of them, their accents moulded at the finest schools. Even the walrus spoke like Queen Victoria herself – if she was gargling a ladle of dripping, that is.

I had a moment, I’ll admit, when the two men I’d seen in the shadows shuffled forward to offer their parable. They were joined at the hip and the shoulder. Brothers in a single coat – two arms and three legs – so far as I could make out.

The Lords Janus came from the travelling people. They didn’t speak like the others, but they didn’t have to. I reckoned their brains worked faster than anyone’s there. They quizzed a wizened old git on a point of finance – making him go through his figures over again in front of us all. They were right – he was wrong. Nearly two thousand times wrong, as it turned out. I saw his hands tremble as he offered his papers to Lord Kite, who deftly took a tinderbox from his pocket, flicked up a flame and burned them.

At the end of their parable each man (except the walrus) went forward, knelt and kissed the back of Lord Kite’s hand. He was clearly the most notable among them. As they knelt he placed a hand on their head, and pronounced a figure to be prepared and collected within the week from our agents. I supposed that meant Telferman. I made a note to ask him about it.

From my reckoning, between them they had London stitched tight as a corpse in a shroud. Mostly I could work out their particular interests by their name. Lord Kite came from the law, Lord Oak and Lord Iron from the navy and the military respective, Lord Mitre stood for the church and Lord Silver for the money. But some were more difficult to reckon until they got going and even then I found it hard to smoke a couple of them, as Sam might have said.

As I listened, I wondered what he’d make of it all.

The tall younger man, Lord Vellum, gave the impression of being very well connected, but I couldn’t catch on to some of the terms he used. And the walrus, Lord Fetch, might just as well have been speaking underwater for all the sense he made.

Most of them referred to papers, I noticed, but Lord Kite and Lord Vellum spoke free and they seemed the stronger for it. I knew I could do that. I had it all locked in my head to the last name and number, to the last brass farthing.

‘. . . And so in good faith, I humbly request that the brothers accept my first parable, given on this day, the first of May, 1881 on behalf of the chapter of Paradise.’ I bowed, and went to kneel at Lord Kite’s feet.

I’d been good. I knew it. I’d mastered my nerves and spoken clear and accurate. They were terrifying, all of them. Every man there had a soul the Devil himself might think twice about welcoming with open arms, but I’d come through and stood my ground. A part of me wondered if perhaps I could do this after all. Give them a performance, that’s what she’d told me. To my mind this wasn’t anywhere near as bad as hanging up in that cage, seventy foot over the punters without a net to catch me.

Lord Kite extended his clenched hand. There was an ugly ring on the first finger. A silver bird’s head with a cruel curved beak that stretched across the back of the middle finger, ruby studs in the place of the eyes.

I waited. I knew the words now:
We accept your parable in gratitude and instruct your agent to make ready the sum of . . .

‘You are wrong.’

I caught my breath. I hadn’t made a mistake, I was certain of it.

As I stared at the back of Lord Kite’s hand he turned it over and opened his fist. The green glass earring ripped from my flesh that night at The Gaudy was in the middle of his palm. I felt something move under my hat. I didn’t realise until that moment that a scalp could actually crawl.

‘Stand.’

I gathered my skirts together, straightened up and locked my hands in front of me to hide the sudden tremor. I heard the rattle of the beads sewn onto my bag. Lord Kite reached forward to run a hand over my face, probing the set of my eyes, my cheeks and my nose as if he was trying to get a sense of what I looked like. Then, swiftly, he moved to my chin and gripped hard.

‘You are wrong to come here, and give such a . . . brazen display. Tell us how you intend to offer a fair wage in Paradise.’ He turned to the others. ‘It seems The Lady’s choice has a limited grasp of the laws of equity.’

I heard laughter and glanced along the arched rows to the side of us. They were all staring at me like hunting dogs in a kennel waiting for the master to release them. The fingers tightened.

‘Tell us how The Gaudy burned to the ground last evening.’

‘I . . . It was delib—’

He cut across me.

‘Tell us . . . about your brother.’ A muscle beneath his blind right eye twitched and just for a second I saw the mask drop. He was barely holding on to a fury that could tear the place apart if he let it free.

‘But I . . . I don’t know where my brother—’

‘Cease.’ Lord Kite let me go and clicked his fingers. The cloaked man who had guided him down the steps appeared again. As he swept past I caught the scent of him – leather, tobacco and spice. My stomach folded over on itself as I recognised that cologne. This was the man who ripped the jewel from my ear in the theatre. The man with the hawk-head cane on the roof at Pearmans Yard. The man who had torn Old Peter apart and draped his insides around the room like bloody Christmas garlands.

‘Have you prepared, Matthias?’ Lord Kite stretched out a hand and the cloaked man took it.

‘Everything is ready as you instructed.’ That voice. I knew it now – heavily accented, almost guttural.

Lord Kite nodded. ‘Come, brothers. The hour is late. Bartholomew waits.’