She shivered and fished a flask from under her outermost coat and unscrewed the cap with trembling gloved fingers, then pulled the scarf down from her face and took a sip. The whisky was warm, and she exhaled a plume of aromatic steam before pulling the scarf back up.
She still couldn’t hear a reply to her singing, and she hoped this unseasonably late winter weather had not diverted them from their usual early-March routine: go to the rooftops to watch for churning black clouds rushing over the skyline. She recalled seeing several of the things during her years as a Lark — sometimes the weirdly distinct little clouds were elongated perpendicular to the direction of travel, and waving at the ends like wings.
And in the moment before her recent singing was answered from another roof, she saw one — a rolling black shape nearly invisible in the snow-veiled distance to the northeast; it dipped and disappeared behind some paler building that blended into the uniform whiteness. I’ll have to mention it to them, she thought, when they get here.
Only because she knew the song was she able to recognize the lyrics audible now from some nearby roof:
She pulled down the scarf for another warming sip of the whisky and then screwed the cap back onto the flask and tucked it away.
She was twenty years old now, far removed from the deep perceptions and narrow lives of the Larks — even seven years ago she had had difficulties dealing with them. She wondered if she would even be able to convey the news of the black flier over Fleet Street.
She hesitated, for she could hear the muffled clatter of them scrambling across the far side of this roof, then sang the last line:
Crouching on the roof now and squinting back up its slope, with one arm braced against the chimney, she saw three shapeless hats, then a fourth and a fifth, poke up from the roof crest above her against the marble sky. The lean faces under the floppy hat brims were in shadow.
“I need to see the old man,” she called. “He sent for me.”
“Bugger that,” one of them growled. He or she was holding a long-bladed knife in one raggedly gloved fist.
“And I saw one of the black fliers just now,” she went on. “It went down over Fleet Street, very near here. Did any of you sorry lot see it? He’ll want to know about it.”
The line of heads wobbled uncertainly, and another of them spoke up. “You got the Neffy smell on you.”
“So do you, each of you. I used to be one of you, damn it. He sent for me, call him.”
For several seconds the shadowed faces just peered down at her. Then regular clanking sounded from the far shoulder of the building; at least one person of adult weight was ascending the iron ladder from the adjoining rooftop. Could it be the old man already?
But she recognized the voice that called “Johanna!” and her eyes widened in dismay.
The Larks had ducked away out of sight on the far side of the roof, and Johanna scrambled up to the peak and glared down at where they were crouched in the lee of an advertising sign overlooking Whitefriars Street.
“Call the old man!” she said fiercely.
After a moment, one of the ragged Larks dug a clay egg out of a pocket and blew the remembered low, mournful note; it rolled away through the snowy air, seeming to shake the spinning snowflakes.
Johanna stared unhappily to her right, at a ridge between two nearby chimneys in the direction opposite the gang of Larks, and soon two bundled-up figures began to appear by labored degrees from behind it, and Johanna recognized her mother’s overcoat, and then her father’s cough. Her mother was forty-one now, and her father fifty-three, and Johanna blinked rapidly to keep tears from spilling down her cheeks and freezing on the scarf. They should both be sitting by the fire back in the rented house in Cherbourg, she thought furiously.
Her father was holding her mother’s hand as she stepped carefully down a snow-covered slope of shingles, the pattens on her boots scraping up shavings of ice, and as he followed her McKee was facing the Mud Larks across the flat section of roof that was hidden from the streets below.
“Where is our daughter?” she demanded. “We heard her singing with you.”
“Up here,” called Johanna through clenched teeth. She pounded a gloved fist against the roof peak, loosening a little avalanche. “I told you not to come after me! I begged you to stay home, in my note! I’m — an adult now!”
“So are we,” gasped her father, waving his arms to keep his balance on the squeaking icy roof. “And then some.”
Johanna hiked herself up to sit astride the roof peak. “How did you … find me?” she called down to them.
“We followed the Larks,” said her father, looking around the rooftop clearing in evident bewilderment.
“Why now?” wailed McKee, squinting up at Johanna. “Cherbourg was safe!”
The Lark blew the little whistle again, and the flat note stretched out over the rooftops.
“Safe for the last what, month?” retorted Johanna. “Just as Rouen was, or Amiens, or St. Brieuc, or — how long do you think it would have been before he found me in Cherbourg too?”
“But,” McKee said, “with no preparation, in the winter — in the middle of the night!”
“And a dreadful day for a Channel crossing,” said her father; he paused to cough, and then he went on, “We caught the first boat out of Le Havre, but you weren’t on it. You must have found one right at the docks in Cherbourg.” He coughed again. “What kind of springtime weather is this?”
Johanna sighed through her ice-crusted scarf, and was about to answer her mother, when a new voice intruded:
“I called her.”
A lean figure in a black Inverness cape and a slouch hat stepped out from behind the tallest chimney, on the far side of the low square area below Johanna.
And she caught a hint of echo in her own head, a leftover of the mental connection that had conveyed his message to her in a dream two nights ago.
Her mother now had her back to Johanna, staring up at the newcomer.
“Are you — a ghost?” asked McKee.
The question seemed to irritate Trelawny — he swept his hat off and flung his head back, his white hair blowing around his dark face in the snow, and said in a booming voice, “I wish to God I were! It’s a bad world that brings an old man out onto the roofs on a day like this. Back down to the streets, now — we’re fools to talk under the bare sky, let alone all clustered together.”
“I saw a flier two minutes ago,” said Johanna. She waved a hand north. “It went to earth a street or two away northeast, probably in the Strand around St. Bride’s or Ludgate Circus.” In spite of everything, she smiled behind her scarf, pleased that she still remembered London geography after having been away for seven years.