This wasn’t, she reflected, the sort of costume in which she could slip unnoticed out of Rat’s Castle.
She padded timidly through the arch, wishing she still had the dagger. In the silence she could hear a bee buzzing somewhere. The long hallway was evidently empty, and she picked her way down it, pausing frequently to listen for pursuit from either direction, but especially from behind.
She climbed a set of stone steps to a wide landing, and in groping to find the next set of steps she brushed the wooden surface of a door. There was no faintest sliver of light visible around the frame or between the boards, so either the room beyond was as dark as the stairs or this was an unreasonably solid door.
She pressed the latch—it wasn’t locked!—and inched the door open. No light spilled out on the stairs, so she hurried inside and closed the door behind her.
She had no way to strike a light even if she’d dared to, so she reconnoitered the room by feel, following the wall around all four sides of the little room back to the door again, and then making a cautious diagonal across the middle of the floor. There was a narrow bed, neatly made, a dresser with a couple of books on it, a table on which Jacky’s gently groping hands felt a bottle and a cup—she sniffed the cup: sharp gin—and, in the corner, a chair on which were draped—and Jacky thanked God as she fumblingly identified the objects—a short dress, a wig, a make-up kit, and an ancient pair of ladies’ leather slippers.
It’s an absolute miracle that these clothes should be laid in my path, she thought. Then she remembered that old Teobaldo had said he’d been ordered to do a full-dress performance tonight—this must be his room, and he must have laid the costume out before, as he’d put it, deciding to die. Though she couldn’t see, she glanced curiously around the room, and wished she could know what the books on the dresser were.
Len Carrington sat down right in the front room and had a long sip from his pocket flask, not caring who might see him. Why was it, he’d have liked to know, that he was suddenly appointed the clown’s second in command, and simultaneously expected to mollify the angry Doctor Romany, evaluate the unsatisfactory reports being run back every few minutes from the team that was trying to catch the two fugitives, and assure the raging Horrabin—who was moaning in a hammock, evidently with bad burns all over himself—that every step was being taken to remedy the situation? Carrington didn’t even understand what the situation was. He’d heard that the dancing dwarf had tried to kill the clown and had then fled down the underground river with a Hindoo, for God’s sake, but if that was so, why was Doctor Romany only interested in talking to the Hindoo?
Someone was trotting up the stairs from the basement. Carrington considered, and then rejected, the idea of standing up.
It proved to be, of all things, a woman. Her hair looked like some sort of rodent’s nest and her dress fit her like a tarpaulin tied around a hatrack, but her face, under a lot of powder and rouge, was pretty. “They told me to look for Horrabin downstairs,” she said, as calmly as if a woman in Rat’s Castle was not as unprecedented a thing as a horse in Westminster Cathedral. “I didn’t see him.”
“No,” said Carrington, scrambling to his feet. “He’s… under the weather. What the devil are you doing here?”
“I’m from Katie Dunnigan, who runs all the accommodation houses around Piccadilly. I’m supposed to arrange a conference—evidently this Horrabin fellow wants to buy in.”
Carrington blinked. So far as he knew the clown had not branched out into prostitution, but it was certainly his sort of thing. And it was inconceivable that a young girl would come to this place without some such reason. He relaxed—she certainly had nothing to do with the two fugitives. “Well I’m afraid you can’t see him now. You’d better leave—and tell this Dunnigan woman to send a man next time! You’ll be lucky if you’re raped less than a dozen times before you get out of this building.”
“Loan me a knife, then.”
“Wha—why should I?”
Jacky winked. “You ever get out to Piccadilly?” A slow smile built on Carrington’s face, and he reached out and slipped an arm around her.
“No no, not me,” she said hastily. “I, uh, have—a disease. But we’ve got clean girls in Piccadilly. Shall I give you the password that’ll get you one gratis, or not?” Carrington had recoiled from her, but now grudgingly reached under his coat and pulled out a knife in a leather sheath. “Here,” he said. “What’s the password?”
Jacky said the filthiest compound noun she’d ever heard. “I know it sounds crazy, but that’s it. Just walk into any of those places, go up to the bouncer by the front door and whisper that to him.”
Jacky walked unhurriedly out of Rat’s Castle, ostentatiously cleaning her fingernails with the knife.
CHAPTER 7
“Youth, Nature, and relenting Jove
To keep my lamp in strongly strove,
But Romanelli was so stout
He beat all three—and blew it out.”
Doyle awakened on his straw pallet Saturday morning and realized that he’d come to a decision; the prospect of what he intended to do dried his mouth and set his hands trembling, but it was the clean jumpiness of a difficult course resolved upon, and it came as a relief after a week of murky indecision.
He realized now that it had been a mistake to pin all his hopes on the intervention of Ashbless. Even if he could find the poet, it was a fantasy to imagine that Ashbless would, or could, do anything to aid him. The conflict was between himself and Doctor Romany, and a confrontation was the only way to resolve it. The sooner it occurred, the better—for Doyle’s health was definitely declining.
He asked Kusiak for the day off, and the old man was happy to give it to him, as Doyle’s hacking cough was getting so bad that customers were uneasy around him, as though fearing he carried some plague. Doyle took the meager cash he’d saved and bought what he thought of as insurance: a battered and rusty old flintlock pistol which the marine store owner had insisted would actually fire, and with which Doyle would threaten to kill himself if Doctor Romany tried to have him seized. Yesterday on London Bridge Jacky had told him about the abortive attempt on Horrabin’s life, and Doyle wished he had the poison pill the dwarf had offered Jacky; it would be easier to carry that between his teeth than to lug around a pistol pointed at his head.
Realizing that his arm would get tired if he should have to keep the heavy pistol pointed at himself for very long, he had taken off his belt, run the end of it through the gun’s trigger guard, and then re-buckled it around his neck. With his coat buttoned up over it and his scarf fluffed out to cover the gun’s muzzle, which was now pressing coldly into the soft spot behind his chin, he avoided being conspicuous and also kept the pistol in a position where one yank of his thumb between the second and third buttons of his coat would send a pistol ball punching up through his mouth, palate, nasal cavity, brain, and then bursting out into the sunlight right aft of his widow’s peak.
In Bishopsgate Street he met a beggar from Captain Jack’s house, and after exchanging greetings the man told him that Doctor Romany’s gypsy camp was currently in a field up at the north end of Goswell Road, telling fortunes for aristocrats from the West End and selling love potions and poisons to the inhabitants of the Golden Lane rookery.