Wild Boy and the Black Terror (31 page)

Come on. Faster…

He slid past the second-floor windows, then the first. Below, the groom rode the Queen’s carriage towards the palace entrance. Wild Boy glimpsed someone else move behind the coach. It was the killer. He had sneaked inside!

Get down there now
.

He was still too high, going too slow. He looked down, a desperate plan forming. Directly beneath, the wind had driven a bank of snow against the wall. Wild Boy hoped it was thick enough.

He let go of the rope.

He fell twenty feet, screaming the whole way, and thumped into the white cushion. He rose, shaking snow from the hair on his face.

Four Gentlemen rushed from the palace, escorting the Queen to her coach.

“No!” Wild Boy yelled. “The killer’s in there!”

His voice was lost to the wind.

Lucien opened the coach door. The glare of his lantern caught the Queen’s tiara. The black diamond sparkled darkly among the pearls. The Queen protested, but this time Lucien wouldn’t be dismissed. He ushered her in, slammed the door and barked to the driver. “Go!”

The carriage didn’t move.

“For God’s sake, man, I ordered you to—”

The words stuck in Lucien’s throat. The driver was in no position to go anywhere. He had been struck by the terror.

“Lucien!” Wild Boy called, staggering closer. “The coach. He’s in the coach.”

Lucien threw open the coach door. “Your Majesty!”

No reply from the darkness inside.

Wild Boy arrived, wheezing and shaking.

Lucien’s hand trembled so hard he could barely hold his lantern as he raised the light to the cabin. “My God,” he said. “My God…”

The killer had gone. So had the Queen’s tiara and the last black diamond.

Queen Victoria, though, was still there.

Shaking and muttering.

Black and white.

Struck by the terror.

34

T
hings quickly went from panic to chaos.

All but a dozen of the Gentlemen had been in the picture gallery when the skylight fell and the terror swept upon them. The rest now struggled to deal with the victims whose lives the poison hadn’t yet claimed. They pinned down convulsing limbs, injected opiates into black-veined necks, tipped brandy into screaming mouths, anything to calm the frantic bodies.

Nothing worked.

The victims were moved back into the ballroom, where they struggled and thrashed on the dance floor like marionettes controlled by madmen. The chandeliers swayed from the volume of the screams, rocking the walls with light.

The Queen was carried to the royal physicians, who wrapped her in blankets, fed her laudanum solution mixed with treacle and waved lights at her eyes. But the doctors knew that nothing could be done for her, not without the killer’s blood. Not without the cure.

Watching from the doorway, Wild Boy wasn’t surprised that the Queen had survived. She was strong, like Marcus, and able to cope better with whatever horrors rampaged through her mind. Like Marcus, too, she was quiet. She muttered instead of screamed, a very
royal
way of living through your darkest fears.

Wild Boy’s coat was soaked from the snow. He couldn’t stop shivering. One of the doctors tossed him a blanket and he pulled it around him, wishing he could sink into it and never come out. Everything had gone wrong. The black diamonds were gone. And now, somehow, the killer would unleash his terror all over London.

A clock began to strike eleven.

Behind Wild Boy, Lucien slumped against the corridor wall. His face looked as if it had slipped down his skull. His jowls sagged lower, and his mouth hung open, whispering the same two words over and over. “My God… My God…”

He swigged whisky from a crystal decanter. The drink spilled down his shirt front but he didn’t notice or didn’t care. “My God…”

He dropped the decanter and charged at Wild Boy, slamming him against the door. “This is your fault,” he seethed, his boozy breath blasting the hair on Wild Boy’s face.

This time Wild Boy didn’t fight back. Lucien was right: he was to blame. It had been his plan, his responsibility. Everything that had happened, that might happen, was down to him. The pit inside him grew deeper, sucking in air.

Lucien shoved him harder against the door. He was about to yell when the decanter was swung from behind and thumped Lucien in the side. He groaned and collapsed to his knees.

Clarissa stood over him, a wild look in her eyes. She raised the decanter to strike Lucien again, but it fell from her fingers. She staggered forward and grasped her head. Her deep moan echoed along the corridor.

“Clarissa,” Wild Boy said. “Whatever you’re seeing ain’t real. It’s the terror, the poison still in you like Dr Carew said. You gotta fight it.”

She looked at him with eyes full of sadness. Then she saw Marcus lying by the fire. Clutching the wall, she pulled herself up and barged past Wild Boy into the drawing room. One of the doctors moved to stop her, but the look on Clarissa’s face convinced him to step back.

She knelt beside Marcus and took his hand.

The clock stopped chiming.

“Sir!”

A Gentleman rushed along the corridor, waving a black cloak. “We found this under the marble arch. The killer dropped it when he fled.”

Wild Boy burst forward. The pit inside him filled with sudden hope. It wasn’t much of a clue, but it was something. “Stop shaking it,” he said. “Hold it still.”

The man panicked and shook it harder.

“Stop it, you imbecile!” Lucien barked.

He took the garment and laid it on a table. “Miss Everett?” he said.

Clarissa turned, surprised by Lucien’s tone. Not anger; an appeal for help.

“At the wax museum,” Lucien said, “you thought the killer had been elsewhere.”

Clarissa shrugged, reluctant to cooperate. Marcus’s hand tightened slightly around her fingers. It was just a spasm, but it was enough to remind her that there were more important things here than her feud with Lucien.

“The killer had a new carriage,” she said. “And his sack and that cloak.”

“So there could be clues on the cloak to show where he went,” Lucien said. “Where his hideout is.” He looked to Wild Boy, their fight instantly forgotten. “Can you see anything that might tell us where? Anything at all?”

Wild Boy stood over the cloak, rubbed his tired eyes. He saw a few feathers stuck to the garment, but they were just … feathers. His senses were dulled. The magic had stopped working.

“I can’t. I can’t see nothing,” he said.

Clarissa grabbed his wrist so hard that her nails dug through his coat sleeve. “You have to see,” she said. “You
have
to.”

She was barely recognizable, her mouth twisted and her eyes like hot coals. Wild Boy realized now why he couldn’t spot any clues. It was Clarissa. He couldn’t concentrate on anything but her. Whatever was going on in her head, whatever the terror made her see, it was taking control of her.

“Everyone get out,” he said. “Just me, Clarissa and Marcus.”

One of the doctors began to protest, but Lucien cut him short. “You heard what he said. Everyone out. We shall carry Her Majesty to the library next door. Doesn’t make a damned bit of difference where she is right now.”

There was a debate over the correct manner in which to handle an incapacitated monarch, until Lucien simply slung her over his shoulder and marched from the room. He stopped in the doorway and looked back. “Find something,” he said.

He closed the doors.

For what felt like an eternity, neither Wild Boy nor Clarissa spoke. The only sound was the wind rattling the window and the crackle of the fire in the hearth.

Clarissa stared into the flames. Her wet eyes glistened. “I don’t understand what’s happening to me,” she said. “I’m so angry all the time. It’s like there’s a tiger in my head. Sometimes it just sits there purring. Then it lashes out and I can’t stop it.”

Wild Boy stayed back, giving her space. “It’s the terror,” he said. “The memories are making you angry.”

“No, it ain’t just that. It was there before; you know it. The terror just made it worse.”

“What is it, Clarissa? What did the terror make you see? Your mother?”

“No…”

“I know she turned against you. But she was crazy.”

“That ain’t what I see.”

She looked at him, tears welling in her eyes. “I see you, Wild Boy. I see you leaving me, just like everyone else has. My mum, my dad and now Marcus.”

The words hit Wild Boy like a punch to the chest so hard that he stepped back.

“You’d leave me,” Clarissa said. “I see it in your eyes. If we don’t save Marcus, that’s what you plan. You’ll think you’re helping me, and no matter how many times I say don’t, you would eventually. That’s what makes me so angry, that you would leave me too. That’s why we have to save him. Then everything can go back to how it was.”

Back to how it was
. Wild Boy didn’t know if that was possible, but he realized something just then. He’d been wrong. He would never leave Clarissa, no matter what. They were together through everything. Without that, there was nothing.

Clarissa crouched beside Marcus. She wiped her eyes, sniffed back tears. “He always told us to clear our heads and think. That’s what you got to do now, Wild Boy. Think like you ain’t never done before. The killer’s got all the black diamonds. That means he thinks his demon is strong again, right? Now he’s gonna spread that poisonous smoke all over London. So how can he do that?”

“It ain’t that simple, Clarissa. It’s… It’s…”

And then it happened. The magic returned. Wild Boy stared at Clarissa as a sharp thrill ran up the hair on his back. It
was
that simple. So many puzzles and clues had crowded his mind. He’d not been able to see through them to see the important question.

How would the killer do it?

There was only one way.

He rushed to the window, rubbed mist from the glass and looked out to the palace forecourt. Dark flakes swirled among the white storm. Polluted flakes.

How would the killer spread poisonous smoke over London?

“A factory,” Wild Boy said. “He’d use a factory chimney.”

But that wasn’t enough. There were hundreds of factories along the river, and no time to search them all.

“What else, Wild Boy?” Clarissa urged. “Keep thinking.”

“Well, whatever the killer burns to make the black smoke, he’s gonna need a lot of it to poison all of London. He must’ve been planning it for a while, been in and out of the factory, taking supplies, setting it up. That means the place is probably shut down, where no one would see him come and go.”

“So we look for a shut-down factory?”

“Yeah, but there must be a dozen. There’s gotta be something else, something I’m missing. Of course! Feathers!”

“Eh?”

“The bloomin’ feathers!”

He rushed to the killer’s cloak and examined the white feathers stuck to its coarse black fabric. “Feathers,” he repeated.

He threw open the doors, strode down the corridor and burst into the library.

Lucien was stoking the fire as the physicians laid the Queen on a couch. Ignoring them all, Wild Boy marched across the room. His eyes roved around stacks of books that filled the walls.