Leave Victrix–and Britannia–to her fate. At this juncture, such a thing would please her, and if she felt another murder within her frame, she would view it as a last unpleasant reminder that she had once served one who secretly despised her.
Magical whore, the mad sorcerer’s disguised voice sneered, and the term was so familiar. It teased at memory, but she set it aside. That was not the slice of the past she wished to consider at the moment.
It took a special pressure to lift the edge of the floorboard, and her hand wormed into the space underneath. Her fingers touched rotting cloth; she shut her eyes and fished the small thing out, settling back on her heels.
It was still wrapped in a scrap of cambric, the threads so rotted they fell apart at her gentle touch. Her skirts would no doubt collect all manner of dust and unwholesome things from the boards, but she did not care. Her fingers trembled as she brushed thin fabric aside, and the pocket-watch, its casing grimed with the passage of years under the boards, gave a slight gleam.
Its chain was short, and it was no doubt a corpsepicker’s bargain, but it had seemed so flash and fine to a young girl, once.
They had both been in a stupor when Emma’s fingers had relieved the man of his watch. She had slid it into the hiding place, intending to pawn it for perhaps enough pence for a pasty, or even a flower for her weeping mother.
But when he woke, he had noticed the theft, and threatened to beat them both to a pulp. The mother wailed that she had been next to him the whole time and her daughter said nothing, despite being prodded and her child’s shift searched thoroughly. Shivering, she had heard the man pronounce his doom: he’d get his pence back from a bawdyhouse, if they would take such a stick of a thing.
Then the cries, the red necklace, the fire.
Emma rose, a trifle unsteadily. The watch hung from its short chain, and she twisted her fingers to spin it, feeling the old childish fascination with its motion. If she wound it, would it work?
Who could tell?
Where the dial spun.
Old guilt rose, its edges sharp, and it was almost a relief to hear the soughing of air moving as the door drifted open.
She stood, very still, watching the spinning. Who cared how Thin Meg had known this secret? What mattered was that Emma had been brought to exactly the right place, and of her own will.
He approached, softly. Did he think her unaware?
When he was close enough, she drew in a sharp breath. “All in, all in,” she said softly, as if they were children playing the perpetual game of tag in the alley.
He halted for the barest moment. Approached, step by step. “Why have you ventured here, Emma?”
His voice, familiar, teased at her memory. She held very still. Come now. Stop speaking. I am offering myself; let it be quick.
“You are so clever, my love,” a dead man breathed in her ear, and he clamped a foul-smelling rag over her face. “Too clever by half.”
Emma’s body slipped her control for a moment, but any struggle was useless. The clot-thick vaporous substance on the rag filled her lungs, and the effect, purely physical, was perhaps the only one that would deprive a wary sorceress of her senses.
She felt, after it all, a certain relief.
Then, darkness.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
And If Not, Vengeance
Aberline hammered at the interior of the front door of 34½ Brooke Street, using quite colourful language, while Clare made himself comfortable on the stairs and, in defiance of all good manners, puffed at his pipe. No servant hurried to find the source of the noise; Miss Bannon had no doubt given orders.
There was no use in seeking to escape until the mistress of the house released them. Little good would be done by exhausting oneself as the good inspector was currently doing, but at least if the man was shouting and hammering he was exactly where Clare could see him.
It was the other man who gave Clare some pause.
Mikal had appeared in the smoking room just after dinner, looking grey and drawn as he did on those rare occasions when Miss Bannon left him to cool his heels. Just behind him had drifted the cadaverous Finch, who did not even deign to glance at the glowering inspector. Instead, he had presented Clare with a folded missive of familiar creamy paper, a delicate, feminine hand–also familiar–on its outer flap, his own name traced with her usual care.
The note inside the folds was extremely simple.
Come and find me.
Which was all very well, Clare thought, but locking them inside her house so deliberately was rather a bar to her stated wish.
The inescapable conclusion, since it was unfathomable that Miss Bannon had not planned this to a fare-thee-well, was that she intended them to issue forth… but not quite yet.
So, he smoked. He had taken the precaution of changing from dinner-dress into something a fraction more suitable to chasing a sorceress across night-time Londinium. Philip Pico, having apparently arrived at the same conclusion, had done the same. Or perhaps he had not dressed for dinner at all.
The rufous youth had settled himself easily on the stairs below Clare, and gone still as a stone. He eyed the inspector’s display with an air of faint condescension, but when his gaze drifted across the silent, haggard Mikal, it became troubled indeed.
Tabac smoke, fragrant, drifted up and was sorcerously compressed near the ceiling into neat spheres that bumbled off in search of a chimney. Clare had arrived at a number of conclusions, but the nagging sense of a missing piece would simply not cease.
Aberline finally left off hammering at the door. He whirled, and fixed Mikal with a baleful glare. “You. Where is she? Why, I’ve a mind to—”
“Cease your chatter,” Mikal returned, amiably enough. “Or I shall make you.”
Clare puffed again, thoughtfully. Quite a riddle the lady had posed. Quite.
Aberline clearly thought better of provoking the Shield any further; he cast about for a new target. “Where’s that knife-throwing son of a whore? Finch!”
“Do be quiet,” Clare remarked. “And do leave Mr Finch be. In any case, he will not answer your summons. There is only one being who commands that man, and she is not at home.” He puffed again. “When you have calmed, sir, we shall proceed.”
“Proceed? We are sitting here while… what on earth can she be doing? What could have possessed the bit—”
It was, strangely enough, Pico who interrupted. “Watch your tongue, guv.” He actually bounced to his feet as well, and his hands were fists. “I’ve had about enough of your high’n mighty.”
Clare sighed. “This solves nothing.”
Whatever Aberline might have replied was lost in a soughing sound.
Clare tilted his head, and the massive clock at the end of the entry hall spoke. In the midst of its chiming, a subtle pressure drained away, and Clare gained his feet with another weary sigh.
Midnight, precisely, and the crackle of live sorcery could only mean one thing. “I believe the door will open now,” he observed. “And our murderer will strike again tonight. I further believe Miss Bannon rather desperately requires our aid.”
Mikal nodded. “Yes.” The word was chilling in its flatness. “The house is no longer sealed. I am no longer Confined. Yet I cannot sense my Prima.”
“Bother.” Archibald jammed his hat firmly onto his head. “I had hoped you could find her in some sorcerous manner.”
The Shield looked positively sick under his dark colouring. “If she is… alive, I could. But I cannot sense her.”