The Bullet-Catcher's Daughter (3 page)

“My problem?”

“Acquiring a husband, Elizabeth. My goodness, girl, of what other problem should you be thinking?”

Several answers occurred to me, but I clenched my jaw and thus my mouth stayed firmly closed.

Leon had the face of a choirboy – a rosy complexion, a mop of flaxen hair and puppy fat around his cheeks. It was his eyes that ruined the suggestion of innocence. They flicked from the contract to the safe in the corner of his seedy office, to my face, to my chest then back to the contract, always calculating.

“The payment isn’t properly due for two months,” I said, touching the small bag I had placed on the desk between us. It contained a couple of gold coins but mostly silver, the very last of my savings.

He shook his head. “I’ll see you in January, then. And bring the right money next time. This is a mile short.”

“I thought perhaps we could agree an alteration,” I said. “I could pay twice a year. Or monthly if you prefer.”

“Why would I do that?”

“There’d be more money in it for you. And it would help us greatly. My brother’s clients have been few this year.”

He leaned back, tipping his chair, his knee jiggling with excess energy. “There’s money in it alright. You got two months to get the hundred guineas. If you don’t, I take the boat.”

“But I’ve come early to negotiate. My brother would see that you’re not out of pocket.”

A grin began to form on his face. “It’s a wager, girl. He bought the boat from me. He pays the instalments and he keeps it. But break the terms and he takes the forfeit. It’s all in the contract.”

“But I thought–”

“Losers always whine. It’s business. He should have read the contract.”

He fished in a jacket pocket for his pipe and pouch then busied his hands charging the bulb with tobacco. His eyes flicked from the worn desktop, to my blouse, to the grimy window glass then back to my blouse again. Through the wall I could hear the chinking of bottles from the public house next door.

I pulled the contract towards me across the scratched veneer, turning it to read. It was a single sheet, big as a newspaper, marked with a grid of fold lines. I ran my finger down its numbered clauses, searching for anything that might suggest a way out. I could think of no means to gather the hundred guineas in time, unless it be from the Duchess’s commission. That now seemed a distant possibility.

There was a soft gurgling as Leon sucked at his pipe, a match held to the tobacco. “Knew you’d never pay,” he said, speaking smoke.

“We still have time.”

“Sure you do.”

“There are still two months.” I shivered, as if the long shadow of the workhouse had touched me already.

“She’s a pretty boat,” he said. “Now you’ve fixed her up nice for me.”

I returned to the wording of the contract, searching the clauses on repayment and boat seizure. “If it’s a wager, there must be a way for you to lose.”

“Nah,” he said. “No point in me drafting a contract like that.”

Chapter 4

Grind salts of potash with your gunpowder to affect a muzzle flash of violet colour. Copper salts make a turquoise flame, whilst calcium yields brick red.

– The Bullet Catcher’s Handbook

On the first of November, being three days after my encounter in the Darkside Coffee House, the mild westerly wind backed to a north easterly. The mercury fell and the first thick fog of winter spread its tendrils to swirl around
Bessie
’s portholes. In an effort to drive out the chilling damp, everyone who could so afford shovelled more coal onto the fire. Smoke rose from chimneys all over the city. Thus the fog thickened, becoming oily and sulphurous.

In a pea-souper everything seems to stop. Blanket-wrapped, I huddled next to the stove, sipping cup after cup of weak tea. Afraid that ice might be forming around the hull, I would from time to time shift my weight from side to side, listening for that tell-tale crackling in the inky water. In such a state, I pondered with increasing desperation the urgency of securing a new commission.

Against all odds I had for three years managed to eke out my living as an intelligence gatherer. Against the law also, for the ownership of businesses in the Republic is the preserve of men. It was
Bessie
that made this precarious existence possible. If I lost her, I would be forced to seek a shared room in a tenement. From such a place, it would be impossible to lead my double life. The spiral of poverty would surely suck me down.

Leon would theoretically require a court order to repossess the boat. That might take a couple of weeks from my failure to make payment. Longer even at this time of year, since all business runs slowly in winter. But more likely, I’d find myself confronted by a crowbar wielding mob, before which it would be hard to argue the finer points of law.

Under a bright sun I might have been able to banish such thoughts. But in the fog they festered.

It was the faint scuffing of shoes and a gentle movement of the boat that told me someone had climbed up onto the aft deck. Few would venture from their homes in the penumbral gloom of the fog. For a second, the ridiculous thought came to me that the Duchess of Bletchley might be outside, a purse of gold in her hand. Then a knuckle wrapped on the hatchway and my mind jumped to darker possibilities. I found myself glancing at the galley knives above the sink.

“Who is it?” I called.

“Will you let me in?”

Recognising the voice, I hurried to slide open the bolt.

“Julia.” I took the young woman’s hand and pulled her inside, quickly closing the hatch behind her. “You’re half frozen, girl. Get by the stove.”

“Don’t fuss. It makes you sound like my mother.”

The layers started to come off, scarf and bonnet first, revealing an eighteen year-old with blonde hair and an impish smile. Her cheeks were always flushed when she visited. I believed this came not from the cold but from daring excitement. In crossing the threshold of my floating home she was stepping off the narrow path that good Republican society had set for her.

“What possessed you to leave the house?” I asked.

“It’s Thursday,” she said. “I always come on Thursday.”

Time had drifted for me under the fog. “Has your lesson come round already? I’m surprised your parents allowed you out with the weather like this.”

“They don’t know exactly. But Mother gets so unreasonable when she’s cooped up. I just had to escape.”

Only now as Julia hung up her coat did I see that she had been carrying a small bag next to her body. From it she drew my leather-bound copy of
The Intelligence Gatherer’s Guide to Legal Process
.

I opened the stove and tipped the coal scuttle, building the fire up in honour of my guest.

“Won’t your mother be concerned if she discovers you’re not in the house?”

“She thinks I’m in bed.”

“And if she were to call you?”

Julia huffed. “I left a note on the pillow. Please let’s not talk about it. I came here to get away from all that.”

“I thought you came here to learn the law!”

Two years ago Julia had persuaded her parents to take me on as a tutor. I believe they agreed in order to discourage her interest in the law. They’d surely drawn a connection between my unorthodox home and the fact that my brother was a private intelligence gatherer. We were living proof that dabbling in the law and criminal detection yielded no good fruit. My youth and lack of training were clearly a bonus to them. Innocent of my secret life, they believed such insight as I possessed must come from books alone. And if my shortcomings as a teacher failed to discourage, the Spartan conditions of our floating classroom would surely do the trick.

Perhaps Julia’s mother still clung to that hope. Her father had long since realised how spectacularly the plan had failed.

I set the kettle on the stove and selected teacups from a pigeonhole. My student paced, running her thumb over a line of carved parish names on the wall:
Sproxton, Garthorpe, Buckminster
.

“What have you studied since last time?” I asked.

She dropped herself onto the bench next to the galley table, opened the book at a marker and read the chapter heading. “The Interception of Communications.”

“The whole chapter?”

“Twice. But I’m still puzzled. Is it legal to shoot down a pigeon or is it not?”

“Legal. If the bird is wild.”

“How can you tell?”

“Any pigeon flying at night must be owned,” I explained. “Night flight isn’t natural. The birds that can do it have been specially bred and trained by the Avian Post.”

“And in the day?”

“You would need to check for a ring on the leg.”

“But you can’t. Not when it’s flying high in the air.”

“I suppose not–”

“In which case, one should never shoot them down. Day or night!”

I watched her leaf through the pages until she came to the heading she was looking for. “Why is there a section on shooting pigeons?”

I sat myself next to her and angled the book to read. “I’d forgotten that was in here.”

“It recommends buckshot,” she said, accusingly.

I did not share Julia’s cornerstone belief in the crisp perfection of legal process. Thus our conversations often came to this point. “It is a... practical guide,” I said. “Our world is coloured in shades of grey.”

Julia was frowning. “The law keeps us from such uncertainty. If you want to see society without it, look beyond the borders of the Gas-Lit Empire! Would you have us live like that?”

“You can’t conjure an argument about the entire civilized world based on the few failed states that lie beyond it! Extreme cases make bad examples.” I took a breath to steady my voice, the pitch of which had been rising.

The kettle began to whistle, giving me the excuse to leave the table and busy myself with pouring steaming water into the pot. “We shouldn’t confuse the ideal of the law with its application. That’s all I’m saying.”

I looked back at her and saw that she was stealing a glance up the gangway towards the sleeping cabins. When I sat once more she leaned in close and whispered.

“Your brother wouldn’t shoot a pigeon, would he?”

“What difference would it make?”

“His life seems upside down,” she said. “Sleeping in the day, working at night. I thought maybe...”

“Maybe he breaks the law instead of catching others who do?”

“I didn’t mean it so forcefully,” she flustered.

“I should hope not!”

“But can you blame me for wondering?”

Indeed my brother was all too fascinating for her. I once again resolved that they should never meet. “Don’t worry for his morals,” I said. “Any brother of mine is as honest as me.”

Julia’s visit had lightened my mood, in spite of our argument. But on the third day of the fog, I could no longer bear the confinement of the boat. Nor could I sit passively and watch the calendar counting down the inexorable approach of my financial ruin. Though I had received no word from the Duchess, there remained one dangling thread for me to reel in. Thus, I resolved to venture into the gloom.

I opened my wardrobe and stroked a hand across the hanging clothes. Freedom of movement is more precious to me than a waist small enough for a man to encircle with his hands. Thus I keep the combined weight of my corsetry and other undergarments well below the three and a half kilogram maximum recommended by the Rational Dress Society. But on this day of penetrating cold, I selected a fuller skirt with two petticoats beneath and was grateful for every layer, not minding the load pressing down on my hips.

The journey from the wharf into the city of North Leicester is simple enough in summer. But had I not made the same trip a hundred times before, I would have become lost. Though daytime, the scenery was so changed by the blanketing fog that I walked clear past the first omnibus stop before realising I had overshot, and was forced to retrace my steps, feeling foolish though there was no one to see.

With a long scarf wound over my hat to protect my ears, I picked my way along the same route I had trodden disguised as a man. Today there was little risk of being seen and no chance of being followed, but I still kept my flintlock gripped inside my rabbit skin muffler.

On entering Cheapside I ducked into a doorway and stood a moment, getting my bearings. The fog has a way of seeming like a living thing. Thickening here and thinning there, it takes on forms such as the tentacles of a submarine creature, reaching out of dark places then withdrawing. Sounds are dulled, strengthening the impression of being underwater.

Two shadows passed some twenty paces distant: a man in a top hat and a woman who led him by the hand, doubtless towards her lodgings. Soft in the distance a beggar called. It was the voice I had been listening for.

Though the Backs is poor, so much wealth passes through it, crossing the border between the Republic and the Kingdom, that even an old beggar might survive on the scraps. Tracing the crumbling brickwork with the fingers of my left hand, I picked my way towards the voice, hearing it call again, like a distant lighthouse.

“Spare a coin for an old girl’s folly.”

For all the wood alcohol she must have consumed in her life on the street, she saw me before I could make her out.

“Have mercy, miss,” she said.

She stood there in the hollow of the doorway clutching a bottle just as she had done last time. I slipped in beside her.

“Did a young man speak with you six nights back?”

“I should not say.”

“He is my brother.”

“You’re afraid for his virtue, miss?”

“For his life. There were three men after him. One wore a top hat of unusual height. The other two were muscled like bulls.”

The old woman was frowning, peering at me more closely. “You and your brother are much alike,” she said.

Feeling embarrassed by her close inspection, I turned and cast my eyes in the direction of the coffee house. “My brother told you he’d return,” I said. “But it proved unsafe.”

“I saw three men, just as you say. But a full five minutes beyond your brother. They’d no sight of him. No way had they followed.”