“How far does this go?”
“Into the gutters,” she said, snuggling up tight to him. “All the runnels and sewers, the new ones, they all meet down here. This is where the meat-men live, and the rat-boys too. But don’t fret. I knows a way up that will bring us near the posh streets, the ones you want.”
“Why should I want them?”
He caught the glimmer of her grin, patient and knowing. “Because that’s where he lives, don’t he? The one you want. The cully what took the mirror.”
Sarah paced the tiny scullery, furious.
Wharton had been polite but utterly firm. He had taken her arm, marched her in here, and locked the door. She gave a small scream of frustration. They had no idea what they were dealing with.
She stopped.
Taking a glove off, she pulled the gray notebook from her coat pocket and for a moment, stared at it.
Reluctant, she opened it. The page was covered with the sloping script of Janus.
I’M SORRY, SARAH. MY REPLICANT IS IN THE HOUSE NOW. AND THANKS TO THAT LITTLE SUBTERFUGE OF YOURS, WHICH OF THEM WILL TRUST YOU ANYMORE? THE BLUFF TEACHER, THE LITTLE GENIE, THE REMARKABLY CURIOUS LOCAL GIRL? GIVE UP, SARAH. OR YOUR PARENTS WILL PAY.
Icy with dismay, she stared at the words, then slammed the book shut and flung it from her as if it were infected.
She had to get out!
She ran to the door and rattled the handle, strained at the lock. Maybe if…
“Girl from the future.”
A quiet, amused voice. She stood very still. She said, “Who is that?”
“Gideon.”
Her hands clasped tight on the handle. She said, “What’s happening? I have to…”
“You can’t get to the mirror. Rebecca and Wharton have gone down there and he’s armed.”
“You could let me out.”
He sounded as if he was laughing, a cool, rare laugh. “Why should I?”
“Listen to me, Gideon. Open this door. Take me into the Wood. Take me to Summer. That’s what I want you to do. And in return, if I get Jake and Venn back, then I promise I’ll get you home. Back to your family. Before this nightmare ever began.”
He was silent so long, she thought he had gone. When he said, “Summer is far too dangerous,” she almost cried with relief.
“I have to try. Please.”
A rattle of sliding bolts. She stood back. The door opened and he stood there, in his moss-green ragged coat, looking at her.
“Will you betray me too, Sarah?”
“Of course not,” she lied.
19
And you would not believe the pleasant happenings! On Christmas Eve the waits came and sang, and then late at night, the mummers with their old play, all dressed in ragged costumes, and then—rather eerie this, my dear—the Gray Mare, a horse’s skull on a pole, carried by villagers. And all the while the land lies deep in winter snow under the roundest of moons…
Letter of Lady Mary Venn, 1834
LIKE A SHADOW, Maskelyne crept down the Long Gallery.
Again he stopped and looked back, swiveling the weapon.
The house was dark, and only moonlight slanted through its casements, reflecting here and there in dim polished wood, the angled smiles of framed faces.
Twice he had thought he had heard a footfall, the faintest tread. And once, a snuffle, a sinister, animal breathing. Quietly he said, “This will kill you, Replicant. Do you hear me?”
Nothing.
He hurried on, letting the mirror draw him. He felt its disturbance like ripples in his mind, like an ache in his bones. It was close now, closer than it had been since that night when the stout, pompous man he had thought such a fool had tricked him out of it.
And he had thrown himself in, guideless.
He came to the covered alcove and drew the curtain aside. There was a door, and it was locked.
He worked quickly. Years in the thieving underworld of London had taught him many skills; he had the door open and closed behind him in seconds.
The Monk’s Walk, its grim cold Gothic stone, made him smile, because this was familiar. He had explored many vaults like this, broken through all too many crumbling sepulchers.
He walked on, carefully.
The room beyond was vast, and dark. He paused in the doorway, listening. Had they left the mirror unguarded?
Because there it was. He could not stop himself, he pushed hastily through the feeble remnants of Venn’s safety web, ducking under broken threads and snapped green cables.
After years, after centuries, after Symmes’s betrayal and his own bitter, stretched arrival, here it was.
His Chronoptika.
He walked right up to it and it showed him his own warped reflection, his face twisted and ugly and then in a shiver of moonlight, handsome and whole.
He leaped back. “Rebecca?”
She had been there, a slant of anxious eyes. He turned, saw her, took one step toward her when a voice said, “Stand perfectly still and drop that weapon. Or you get both barrels.”
The big man, Wharton, had a shotgun pointed right at him.
Maskelyne took a breath. He crouched, and slowly laid the glass weapon on the floor.
“Move away from it,” Wharton barked.
He took one step.
“Rebecca. Get it.”
She slipped out from the shadows and ran and picked it up, gingerly, as if it were hot.
“Now.” Wharton came forward into the light, cradling the shotgun; he took the weapon from her and looked at it, grim. “I want to know how you got in here. And who the hell you are.”
Maskelyne was silent. He felt so weary, he wasn’t sure if he could speak.
It was Rebecca who spoke. Facing Wharton, she drew herself up and she was nearly as tall.
“Actually, he’s sort of from the past. And he’s with me.”
Symmes’s house was a large one, in a wide London square. From the darkness of the gardens opposite, Jake staked the place out, noting its pillared porch, the black railinged servants’ area in front with its worn steps, the lofty windows—one, on the first floor, cozily lit behind its looped curtains.
Moll breathed noisily at his back.
They had crossed a London of nightmare that he had barely recognized. Great rookeries of filth and squalor, sudden tangles of slums, and then at a turn of a corner a gracious street, a wide avenue he knew in his own time. But the foul stench of the place, its rumbles and clanks, even its voices, had an alien note; they seemed to hang too long in the air, to be pitched too high. The books he had read—Sherlock Holmes, even Dickens—had not prepared him for the sheer brutality, the hundreds of horses, the opulence of the women’s dresses, the scrawny crossing-sweepers with their sickly, pocked faces.
Now he looked down at Moll. Her breathing was harsh after the running. What would happen to her? Consumption? Smallpox? He had a sudden mad idea of getting her back through the mirror with him, seeing Piers’s astonished alarm, when she said, “He’s got a visitor.”
He turned.
The house front was lit by a solitary gas-lamp; in its cone of light he saw a man walk along the street and pause at the steps, then stride up and rap impatiently at the door knocker.
“Closer,” he muttered.
They crossed the road. Tree-shadows from the gardens rustled over them.
The man was tall; he wore a dark hat, and as he swept it off and the hall light fell on his fair hair and lean face, Jake took a breath of surprise.
“Who is it?” Moll whispered.
“It’s Venn.”
He was intensely relieved, and then filled with bitter envy. Venn obviously hadn’t been set on by thieves; judging by his Victorian outfit, it had been he who had done the stealing.
Jake moved along the railings. “Venn!” he breathed.
Venn turned, fast, but at that instant the door opened and a servant in a dark suit said, “Yes?”
Venn swung back. “My name is Oberon Venn. I’d like to see Mr. Symmes.”