A Scandal in Battersea Read online

  Perhaps ten minutes after that, he heard the key in the lock, and the sound of feet stamping on the mat. Alf, of course; and moments later, Alf came into the kitchen, looking for him.

  “All’s well?” he asked, turning his grizzled head to one side in inquiry.

  “It took both of them. It did seem to study them for a while, but it was pleased enough,” Alexandre told him. “It told me we’ll need four more pairs.”

  “So . . . magic seven.” Alf pondered that. “Oi t’ink we’ll need t’ change our pattern, aye? Perlice are gonna go crazy. This’s nummer three, and lummy, even if Ma an’ Pa try t’keep it quiet . . .”

  Alexandre nodded. “The papers will be on to it soon. I was thinking the same thing earlier today. But the thing is absolutely firm that we take girls that are going to be kept together, and that means girls whose families have money or rank, and I don’t know how we’re going to manage that for much longer.”

  “Lemme poke about fer a couple days, see wut I c’n learn,” Alf replied. “Yer missed somethin’. Wut the thin’ said, or wut hit kinda said.”

  “What do you mean?” Now Alexandre was mystified.

  “Hit said, hit wanted four more pairs, which’s seven, which’s good solid magic. But th’ last time, hit said hit wanted fancy girls, so’s they’d be kept t’gether. Roight?”

  “Right,” Alexandre replied dubiously, then it struck him. “Oh! With this one, there would only be two kept together, which would mean we’d need five more pairs, not four!”

  “Roight. So fer some reason, they went an’ moved th’ fust girl.” Alf nodded. “Thet means we c’n ’unt fer somethin’ a bit less risky from naow on.”

  “Well . . . well spotted, Alf!”

  Alf laughed, and touched two fingers to his temple by way of a salute. “Thenkee guv. I jest wanter find out ’o ’ad th’ fust girl moved, an’ why. Then we’ll figger where next t’ ’unt.”

  “Meanwhile . . . peckish?” he asked, getting up and fetching the brandy, intending to raid the larder. It occurred to him at that moment that lately he’d been doing a fair amount of waiting on Alf, rather than the other way around.

  He shrugged mentally. Alf wasn’t getting above his place—and in a sense they were partners now, with Alf contributing as much or more to the situation as he was. I certainly couldn’t do this without Alf.

  “Fair starvin’, guv,” Alf replied. “But arter all that ridin’ around i’ th’ snow, Oi want somethin’ ’ot. Yew jest sit, an’ Oi’ll make up a rarebit.”

  There, see, he knows his place. He set the brandy aside and got bottled beer for each of them. The brandy could wait until later.

  He had the feeling that after that “conversation” with the entity . . . he was going to need it to sleep.

  13

  “I THINK we should go to the theater,” Sarah said suddenly, over breakfast.

  “What, now? Today? Why?” Nan looked up from her eggs, and Neville took the opportunity to steal the bite off her fork. He flapped off with it, cackling. She sighed. She’d given him eggs . . . but evidently stolen food tasted better.

  “Because we’ve been working our minds into a froth, trying to get even a glimmer of an idea about these abductions,” Sarah replied, giving Grey a piece of buttered toast before the parrot could follow Neville’s example and steal something. “We’ve been eating, drinking, breathing, and even dreaming about this problem, and we need to give our minds a rest. Hamlet is playing, and I’ve never seen it on the stage, I’ve only read it.”

  Nan rubbed her temple as she considered the idea. It had merit. She’d been thinking in circles for at least two days. There was no news from Sherlock, none from John and Mary, and Memsa’b’s visit to the hospital had only led to the same conclusion that Nan had come to—that the two girls were completely soulless, which was absolutely of no use whatsoever. The only references to being unensouled any of them had found thus far were in folk and fairy tales and fanciful theatrical productions. None of these were in the least helpful, since people without souls in such things were perfectly able to think and act—they just did so with no morals whatsoever.

  “Well, I hate to admit it, but we’re getting nowhere,” she said. “All we know for certain is where and when the girls were taken, and where and when they were found. The fact that they were found in Battersea suggests their abductor took them somewhere about there, but we can’t search five boroughs for a magician. It would be like asking a blind man to search for a red marble in a bowl full of white marbles.”

  “I’m certain Sherlock is doing something clever about that,” Sarah replied. “Really, when it comes to searching the non-magical aspects of this case, it should be left up to him. He is the detective, he has the practice, the skills, and most of all the knowledge of what clues to look for. Robin is looking for the magician, and he and John and Mary are best suited to that. What we need to do is to figure out what we, and we alone, can do. We already know what we can’t. And for that, we need to give our minds a rest. And I think the theater is the best way to do that. If we try to read, we’ll just keep interrupting ourselves, fretting, and losing track of the story we’re reading. At least, I know I will. And if we listen to a concert, I am certain I won’t be able to concentrate on it. We need a complete distraction.”

  “All right,” Nan agreed. “The theater it is.”

  After no more visions from Amelia—and time for Amelia to get better acquainted with Memsa’b—they had returned to their flat for a few days. Amelia was feeling braver, and more confident, after that last foray into—wherever it was the visions had taken her. And she had agreed to let Memsa’b accompany her the next time it happened. Her room was already next to Memsa’b’s, and thus far, the visions had all occurred shortly after her usual bedtime. So, it had been decided that Memsa’b would simply stay up a little while longer, reading, and if nothing happened by midnight, go to bed. Sahib had agreed to let her sleep late and take over any of her morning duties.

  Nan looked over her shoulder at Neville, who had finished his stolen beakful of egg and was now eating his own food. “Do you two have any objection to us going to the theater this afternoon?” she asked.

  Neville looked up, and shook his head side to side. Grey swallowed what she had just picked out of her bowl and said, “Go play.”

  “I believe we have permission,” Sarah said wryly, with one raised eyebrow.

  It struck Nan then that before all this started, Sarah would have chuckled at that—and that neither of them had laughed since . . . well, since they’d seen the first victims. But how can we laugh when we know there is someone, something, out there that can rip the soul out of someone’s body? Knowing that . . . gets between me and everything else going on. It feels wrong doing anything except concentrating on the problem. It was probably just as well that Sarah’s choice of play was Hamlet, a tragedy. It wouldn’t have felt right, going to see Gilbert and Sullivan or something of the sort.

  Feeling as if she needed to earn her brief respite from thinking about the problem, she applied herself grimly to it after breakfast and the usual chores, plowing through several desperately dreary tomes sent over by Lord Alderscroft from the White Lodge library; these were mostly dry and erudite treatises on obscure religions. They didn’t help either.

  The two of them set off with a word to Mrs. Horace that they were going out and would be back by supper. Snow threatened, but so far was holding off. As they walked far enough to a ’bus stop and caught an omnibus, Nan found her spirits lifting a little at the prospect of getting away for a few hours. And immediately felt mingled relief and shame. Relief, that they were at least leaving the insoluble problem for one wretched afternoon . . . and shame that she was feeling relief.

  Blast it, she thought, pulling her cloak tightly around her in the unheated ’bus. It’s not as if we’re going there with the intent to get pleasure out of it! We’r
e going to stop our heads from going in circles for a little while! There’s no shame in that!

  She wished she had a mind like Sherlock’s in that moment—a mind that actually enjoyed teasing apart impossible things until he got to a solution, a mind that found the apparently insoluble to be stimulating. There didn’t seem to be any challenge so great that Holmes didn’t welcome it. But then . . . then my mind would be buzzing in aimless circles like his does when he doesn’t have a problem to solve, and his solution for that is cocaine . . . no, perhaps that is more of a curse than a blessing.

  At matinee prices they could afford to splurge on good tickets, and so they did. They had arrived just as the box office opened, and so they were in good time to settle into very good seats in the dress circle before anyone else was in that row. The seats weren’t as plush as the ones in the boxes, of course, but they were a lot better than the ones in the balcony, and Nan felt a glimmer of pleasant anticipation. They both examined their programmes critically.

  “Oh dear,” Sarah said, her brows creased as she encountered something in the programme.

  “What?” Nan wanted to know. Surely there isn’t anything in an innocuous booklet to cause her to make that face.

  “Well . . . we’ve got a very good Ophelia and Horatio, and quite sound actors for the other roles—but the Hamlet is an understudy. Not just that, but the third understudy.” Sarah’s mouth twisted wryly. “I fear the worst.”

  “Well, he can’t be that bad, can he?” Nan replied, and clapped her hand to her mouth the moment the words came out of it. Because of course, now that she’d challenged Fate, fickle Fate would certainly take notice and prove her wrong. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

  Sarah sighed. “No. You shouldn’t.”

  “Do you know anything about him?” Nan asked with trepidation. Perhaps Fate hadn’t noticed her blunder yet.

  “No,” Sarah replied, a little grimly. “Well, the very worst that will happen is that either this will turn into a farce, or the producer will pull him and put the Ghost into his costume. I’d almost rather see a septuagenarian Hamlet than a terrible Hamlet.” Then her grim expression turned a little lighter. “If it turns into a farce, we can whisper rude things to each other and laugh at what are supposed to be the most serious parts. That should be ample punishment for him.”

  It appeared, as the seats filled in around them, from the murmurings of their fellow audience members, that the rest of the audience, at least those down here in the dress circle, shared Sarah’s trepidations. And when the curtain came up—

  —the Hamlet was every bit as dreadful as they’d feared.

  Halfway through the first act, Nan decided that she had seen better acting at the Panto before Christmas than that man was producing in what was ostensibly a serious production. It was past belief. It was well past farce. In fact, Nan finally decided that since the tickets were paid for, she would just sit back and marvel at just how terrible it was—and, as Sarah had suggested, giggle at the places where he was overacting the worst. Perhaps she could get other audience members to share in her laughter. There was a certain sardonic pleasure in it—and it certainly was a distraction from their problem.

  When the first interval came, and people began moving to the lobby for refreshment, she was about to ask Sarah about doing the same when—

  She felt it. A familiar brush of cold, calculating evil. A flash of a cold, bleak London, where the trees were barren, but there were living things that ached with hatred, and behind it all was a savage, arrogant intelligence with a hunger great enough to devour a world. This was certainly the same ominous presence she had sensed in Amelia’s visions!

  Her head snapped up like a hound that has caught a scent, but in the next moment, it was gone, leaving no trace of itself behind. As if the thing knew she had sensed it, and vanished out of her world and back into its own.

  “What?” Sarah asked urgently, as Nan cursed under her breath and sent her mind skimming through all the others in the theater, hoping to find a glimmer of what had summoned the thing.

  “I thought I felt that . . . intelligence behind Amelia’s visions,” she whispered back. “It’s gone now, but . . . I wonder if I felt it hunting?”

  “The places it has hunted before were a mostly deserted decent street, a gallery . . . all places where a girl should feel perfectly safe. So a theater matinee would be another place a respectable young woman could go without a second thought,” Sarah replied, now sounding quite as concerned as Nan felt. “I don’t think you’re being alarmist. Did you get any sense of direction, where it was, or who it was looking at?”

  Nan shook her head, regretfully. “No, nothing. But if it’s hunting, I might get another brush of it, if I keep my inner eye open. And I will,” she added grimly, and settled down in her seat, closing her eyes. So much for Hamlet.

  Indeed, she was so intent on sniffing out the least little hint of that presence that she was scarcely aware of a word of the second or third act. If that thing was still lurking about, she didn’t want to leave her own mind open to it, so she had to skulk behind her shields. Which made her able to sense things only obliquely, and see nothing of the thoughts of those beyond her immediate area. Certainly she couldn’t read the thoughts of anyone in the first balcony, much less the second. But then, it was nothing human she was looking for; the icy alienness of it should shout out to her without her needing to be able to read thoughts.

  The audience responded only tepidly when the curtain came down, so there was only one curtain call, during which Nan made a last scan for the cold aura of the hunter and found nothing. She was both frustrated and angry as they made their way to the street. Frustrated, because of her lack of success. Angry—well at herself. If that had been a hint of whatever had been preying on those girls, she had let it get away. I should have found a way to track it! Damn and blast it all!

  They fetched their cloaks and shuffled out with the rest of the crowd into the late afternoon gloom—it was overcast, and the snow that had been threatening was coming down in earnest. If it kept up like this, there’d be several inches on the ground by morning.

  Sarah hailed a cab, and Nan was not disposed to object, both because snow was coming down quite thickly, and because there would be no chance to talk in private in a ’bus. Despite the crush of other people wanting to get out of the snow as well, Sarah managed to catch the eye of a young fellow, who grinned at her and beckoned them over, waving off several other would-be riders.

  When they were both tucked into the hansom and the doors were closed, Sarah turned to her with concern. “I know that look on your face, Nan, and you are not to blame yourself!”

  “And why not?” she said, tightly. “I sensed the damn thing, and now we know it’s out there hunting, if it hasn’t already found a victim. I sensed it, and I wasn’t fast enough; I couldn’t keep track of it!” she snapped.

  “Because it’s magic. I’m sure of it! And what do we know of magic, really?” Sarah countered forcefully. “Only what we’ve seen others doing! Frankly I think you’re lucky you sensed it at all. It probably wasn’t aware that you—or anyone—could. It either withdrew quickly, or hid itself in a way you couldn’t possibly hope to penetrate. Being angry at yourself for losing it makes as much sense as being angry that you can’t track a tiger like Karamjit can. We can’t do everything, Nan, no one can.”

  For once, Sarah’s admonishments got to her. She nodded.

  Seeing that her words were having an impact, Sarah’s tone softened. “Now what we can do is what we’re going to do. We’re going to stop at John and Mary’s and leave a message for them, then we’re going home and tell Durwin to tell Robin we think the thing was on the hunt today and may have already found a victim. Nan, be sensible! Would you try wrestling with a fire hose if you saw a house on fire and there were already firemen about? The smart thing, the only thing to do is make sure people who can do som
ething are on the alert.”

  Nan sighed, and some more of the anger at herself ran out. Though not the frustration. “When you put it that way . . . no.”

  “Then see if you have a pencil in your purse. I know I have paper, but I didn’t bring a pencil with me,” Sarah said, with great practicality.

  Nan hunted among the pennies and odd buttons and a peppermint or two at the bottom of her purse and did come up with the stub of a pencil. Armed with these, when the cab reached 221 Baker Street, Sarah popped out of the cab and ran in. She was gone longer than it would have taken to write a note, so Nan surmised she’d found one or both of the Elemental Masters in.

  When she finally emerged, she paused long enough to give some instructions to the cabby and flung herself into the cab precipitously. She didn’t even have a chance to get the door shut before the cab lurched off. She and Nan both had to lean out together and pull the door shut with a slam.

  “I told him there was a florin in it if he got us home as fast as the traffic and his horse could take us,” she told Nan, as they both settled back into the seat. “John is at his surgery, Mary was in. I explained what you had sensed to her. She agrees there is great cause for alarm. She’s going to get John and they are going straight to Lord Alderscroft. They are going to convene as many of the White Lodge tonight as they can, in hopes of finding something, or even stopping this thing.”

  It was evident that this cabby knew every backstreet in London like the lines of his own hand. He didn’t send the horse into a careening gallop—that would be bad for the horse in these conditions, not to mention foolhardy with regards to pedestrians—but he kept the beast at a brisk trot and occasionally broke into a canter when he cut down a particularly quiet lane. It was an agony, every moment that passed in which she hadn’t been able to tell Robin or Memsa’b that the monster was abroad made her more frantic to get home. She kept reflexively checking the pendant watch around her neck. Florin or not, Nan hadn’t really had much hope for speed, but this young man pulled the cab up in front of their door in roughly half the time she had expected. Nan flung herself out of the cab and let Sarah pay the driver; she ran in the front door and up the stairs, pausing only to unlock the door and throwing herself through the door as soon as she got it open. “Durwin!” she cried as soon as she got inside. “It’s an emergency!”