A Scandal in Battersea Read online

  She stood up again, gathered her dressing gown around her, and went back to bed. There was nothing more any of them could do until daylight.

  Holmes joined them at the hospital at about teatime. As expected, the police in Battersea had called him in, but it had been very shortly after Amelia had had her vision, rather than the first thing in the morning. Evidently they were so rattled at the Battersea constabulary that they chose to call in Holmes immediately rather than waiting. The new girl had been found by a cabby on his way to his home in Battersea; by now all the cabbies knew to be looking out for girls wandering the streets in a daze.

  They had met in the large room where the girls were being kept in a row of beds installed for the circumstances. Holmes had been waiting there, in front of the fire at the opposite end of the chamber from the girls, when the contingent from the school arrived.

  “This one is different, very different,” Holmes said, with what sounded oddly like satisfaction. “I believe our unknown foe has grown desperate. All the other girls were in their mid to late teens. This child is barely thirteen. The others were girls of middle or upper class. And we were meant to think this girl was the same; superficially, this girl was dressed in fine garments no working class girl would ever dream of owning, much less wear, and she was immaculately groomed.”

  “But obviously, Holmes, you found something different,” Watson stated. Holmes grinned. “Let me guess. She was malnourished, her skin, hair and teeth showed the effects of an insufficient diet. And she had calluses no girl of good standing would ever display.”

  Holmes tipped an imaginary hat to his partner. “Quite so. It was obvious on removing her shoes and stockings that fine, well-fitted shoes were something she didn’t wear at all; her feet showed the signs of being blistered and healed many times, as if by poor-fitting shoes or wooden clogs of the sort worn in workhouses, and she had chilblains. Her hands showed the distinctive calluses and cuts derived from oakum-picking, that is, unraveling old ropes into their fibers. I have never seen marks of this sort outside of a workhouse.”

  The large concert hall space was rather too large to heat effectively; they were all huddled around the fireplace at one end; Nan and Sarah were draped in their second-best plain wool cloaks with quilted lining, with blankets over the top and the birds on their laps underneath. Grey and Neville’s heads poked out through the openings in the front. “So the girl is from the workhouse? Was she a virgin?” Nan asked bluntly. As she could have predicted, John Watson blushed. Sherlock, however, answered her straightforward question just as bluntly.

  “She was, which tells me there are not many workhouses in London that she could have come from. There are only two or three that maintain such strict separation of the sexes that girls past puberty retain their virginity for very long.” He paused. “She was . . . very plain. Which probably aided her in keeping that condition.”

  “Do you think all that was meant to deceive the monster?” Sarah asked curiously.

  Holmes shook his head. “Not at all. I think it was meant to deceive us, so that although her origin was unknown, we would assume she was of the same social standing as the rest of the girls and bring her here. Our foe must have been desperate enough to go to the effort of obtaining a workhouse girl, and by doing so, he left a trail I may be able to follow back to him once we have eliminated the greater threat. So, the main question now is, when do we want her brought here? Because the moment she joins the rest, our time begins to run out. I sensed a great impatience in that monster when we confronted it. I think it will be no time at all before it makes its move once the seventh girl is here.”

  He looked around the circle of faces; besides all the original group who had ventured into that strange world, only the leaders of the new combatants were here, representing their people. Lord Alderscroft for the White Lodge, or those of the White Lodge who had any sort of magic that could be considered a weapon. Sergeant Frederick Black for the platoon of soldiers. Memsa’b stood for a circle of psychics she had managed to gather—none of them was as strong as Nan, so they would work together, while she worked alone. Robin—well, Robin was bringing Elementals, or so Nan assumed, but he had said with a bit of a grim look that they were not Elementals that anyone here would recognize. If circumstances had been less fraught, she would have been wildly curious about that. As it was, she just hoped that whatever they were, they were going to be fierce enough.

  Sarah . . . Sarah had been going about these past few days with an abstracted look on her face, and Nan assumed it was because she was communing with spirits. Whether or not spirits could be of any help—well, Nan had no idea. They certainly had been useful against the Lorelei, but the thing they faced now was a lot tougher than a single woman, however magical she was, and it was bringing with it an army.

  “I think we’re all ready, sir,” said the Sergeant. “We ain’t going to get any readier for more waitin’.”

  Holmes nodded. “Then I’ll go and bring her myself in the morning. You all know the plan. The rest of you, get sleep, a good meal, and be ready to face this thing once I arrive with her.”

  He got up and left, and all the rest except Nan and Sarah dispersed.

  The room they were in looked more like a ballroom, or the banqueting hall at Hampton Court Palace, than a concert hall. Perhaps it had been intended to serve all of these functions when the hospital had been built. It was one single, large room, wooden paneled and floored in oak, about three stories tall, with the windows all in the upper half of the walls. So at least the drafts weren’t bad. It was much longer than it was wide, with a fireplace and two doors at either end. The girls were lying in their beds on the other side of the hall, uncannily silent, like unmoving lumps of blankets. They were absolutely, mechanically obedient to even quite complicated commands. Three times a day, a nurse went to each in turn, ordered her out of bed, walked her around the room, ordered her to eat and drink, then walked her to the water closet to do whatever it was she needed to do. Then the girl was ordered back into bed, and the nurse moved on to the next. The whole procedure took three hours, about thirty minutes for each girl. It was . . . very uncomfortable for Nan to watch. The whole thing made her queasy. The empty eyes haunted her dreams. The sounds they made, walking on the wooden floor in their slippers, were so mechanical that they could have been giant puppets rather than girls. The only thing that made any difference in their behavior was giving them morphine, which made their bodies sleep.

  “I’ve been talking to the ghosts here,” Sarah said, interrupting her thoughts.

  “There’s ghosts here?” Nan replied, surprised. “I would have thought this place was too new for ghosts.”

  “The doctor also accepts wealthy people who are going to die,” her friend said, matter-of-factly. “It has mostly been people with consumption, but there was one gentleman who contracted some sort of strange sickness in Egypt, and a couple who did the same in India, and some from the Boer War. They are all former officers. They are actually eager to help. They . . . they think they are confined to earth for some dereliction of duty, and if they can discharge their obligations by defending England here and now, they’ll be free to move on.”

  Oh—what stuff and nonsense! “You did tell them that’s not true, right?” Nan demanded.

  Grey sighed. “Stubborn,” she said.

  “Grey is right. Their minds are completely made up. If they believe it that truly, there is nothing I can do to convince them otherwise. At least,” she added thoughtfully, “Not with so little time to work with. However, that means I have a small army of spirits that are helping me. They all confirm that the girls are soulless. This . . . disturbs them, even more than it disturbs us. And it has confirmed in them the desire to find out just what happened to those souls.”

  “Is that going to help us?” Nan asked doubtfully.

  “It won’t hurt,” Sarah pointed out. “We really need to know how the thi
ng does that, and they’ll be in the best position to tell us that before it happens to one of us. And, I hope, warn us in time to save us from such a fate!”

  Robin, who was, as usual of late, looking like a completely ordinary young man of the “country yeoman” sort, wandered up to them. Nan noticed that even after being “within housen” for days now, he still smelled pleasantly of ferns, moss, and a faint hint of pine. He looked grim. “The question I have, which I am going to put to you young ladies, since you have been witness to it in action, is this. I have many of the older, more dangerous Earth Elementals at my disposal now, like trolls—though I have been careful to pick the ones that have never tasted human flesh, so I can direct them against the monsters that will come. But this may be a battle in which we need everything. Do I call the Wild Hunt?”

  Nan looked up at him, and so did Neville. “What is your concern?” she asked him. “I know they are dangerous, and I know they can affect spirits as well has the living. But what about them has you worried?”

  “The Hunt is . . . neither good nor evil, and I do not control it, though I can summon it. It answers only to the Huntsman. He determines who or what is fair prey. Normally, on the rare occasions when I’ve summoned it, there is been someone obviously very wicked that needs to be dealt with. But this time. . . .” He shook his head. “Is that monster wicked? Are its subjects?”

  “Robin, it’s been ripping souls out of innocent girls!” Sarah replied, in a scandalized tone of voice. “It tried to kill us! It’s certainly been killing other people!”

  “Yes, but . . . by the standards of the world it is in, that might not be wicked. That might just be survival. And I don’t know what the Huntsman will think of that.” He looked helplessly from Nan to Sarah and back again. “And as if that isn’t bad enough, some of the people here have probably done things in their lives that the Huntsman would deem sufficiently wicked to make them prey. What if he turns on us rather than on the monster and its minions?”

  And Neville made a rude sound at him. Astonished, Robin looked down at the black-feathered head poking out of the front of Nan’s cloak. “And what exactly does that mean, bird of ill omen?” he demanded.

  “Monster wins, Huntsman dies. Stupid,” Neville replied, and made another rude noise, expressing with tone rather than words just what at idiot he thought Robin was. “Huntsman is not stupid!”

  Robin stood there with his jaw working back and forth for a very long moment. “I hate to admit that I have been bested by a bird, but you are right,” he said at last. “This is the Huntsman’s world as well. I think I’ll be safe in summoning him.”

  “You’re overthinking,” Sarah said in a kindly tone of voice. “I’m not surprised; this is probably the longest you’ve spent among the Sons of Adam and the Daughters of Eve in a very, very long time. We’re contaminating you with our prevarication and indecision.”

  He shook himself not unlike a dog. “Brrrr. I think you are. After this, I am going to take a very long time among the wild sheep of the Orkneys. And I am not sure that will be far enough to get my mind set back where it belongs.”

  Let’s just all get through this alive, please, was Nan’s only thought.

  Morning light streamed through the high windows in the hall. The fireplaces here were fed with wood, not coal, and the pleasant scent of woodsmoke flavored everything. The soldiers were set up against the walls along both sides of the room, rifles at the ready, ammunition piled beside each of them. Some special ammunition, too: all of it had been blessed by their chaplain, and some of it was dipped in silver. Memsa’b and Sahib fronted a small group of psychical workers in one corner. A handful of magicians, including John and Mary and fronted by Lord Alderscroft, waited in the opposite corner—that would be the members of the White Lodge who were capable of offensive magic, most of which were Fire Masters like Alderscroft himself. Nan and Sarah stood with the psychics. They were dressed for action, Sarah in a divided skirt and boiled-wool jacket, with leather guards on her forearms, Nan in men’s riding jodhpurs, stout boots, and a heavy leather vest over a tunic of boiled wool.

  Sherlock led the seventh girl into the room with the others. “Stand there,” he told her, positioning her in the midst of their beds. Then he moved to the fireplace behind their beds.

  A hush fell over the room. No one moved.

  The silence held for so long that for a moment Nan was afraid that nothing was going to happen. That they had been mistaken, that the seven girls had nothing to do with the creature’s intentions, and that it would cross—or had already crossed—somewhere else and its invasion had already begun.

  But then, abruptly, she felt the temperature drop, and her breath puffed out in clouds in the suddenly frigid air.

  She didn’t need to see the other six girls rising from their beds and joining the seventh to know that her fears had been wrong. The thing was coming, and coming now.

  19

  THE girls all suddenly rose from their prone positions at exactly the same moment. As one, they swung their legs over the sides of their beds, and the soldiers tightened their grips on their rifles. As one, they stood up and began walking until they converged on the new one. With a strangely sinuous motion, eerily reminiscent of the writhing of tentacles, they entwined their arms until they were bound in a tight circle. They tilted their heads back, opened their mouths, and began to chant.

  Monotonous, identical no matter which throat it was coming from, and utterly unintelligible syllables emerged from them in a kind of drone. There was nothing about the guttural chant that was even remotely familiar to Nan.

  But it certainly had an effect on the Celtic Warrior—and on Grey and Neville. She felt a primal rage engulf her—some incarnation of the past recognized those words—and in a flash, she was wearing her bronze armor, woolen tunic and trews, and carrying her glowing bronze sword and a small round wooden shield strapped to her arm so she could still use her sword two-handed at need. And Neville was now the size of an eagle, with Grey the size of a huge hawk. This time, instead of staying with the girls, they both flew up to the rafters. Nan placed herself between the group of psychics and the chanting girls; Memsa’b in her short Grecian tunic and with her spear and Sahib in his medieval armor and with his sword both moved to flank her. And flanking them were Agansing and Karamjit, a wedge of protection in front of people who were ill-equipped to defend themselves.

  On the other side of the room, Lord Alderscroft and half of the magicians with him held out hands that were engulfed in flame while fire in the form of lizards climbed over their shoulders or wove patterns around their feet. John Watson’s form of offense was more mundane; he had a shotgun and a double bandolier of shells. Nan couldn’t see Mary from where she stood, but she knew that Mary was a fine shot with a rifle and probably had one in her hands.

  A black void formed between the chanting girls and the assembled defenders. It doubled in size every few seconds, until it stood nearly a story tall.

  And then the monsters poured through it, and with them the strange, bitter wind of that other world. Dozens of them. Not just the things Nan had seen before, but other creatures, things that in the chaos she barely got a chance to look at, much less identify. She only knew that she was fighting for her life and the lives of those behind her as the things hurled themselves at their line. She heard the steady crack of rifles and the voice of the Sergeant, calmly, calling out orders. But mostly she saw horrifying, hideous things flinging themselves at her, trying to disembowel her with claws and talons, shred her with fangs, crush her with powerful jaws, sting her with barbed tails. The stench of these things was overpowering, bitter, sour, poisonous. She didn’t remember that from the other world—but maybe that had been because they had all been in the open then and were in the confines of four walls now.

  Neville and Grey dove at the things from above, shoving off from the beams where they perched, plummeting to hammer at a head or r
ip at a limb with their powerful beaks, and flapping back up to safety before the monsters could retaliate.

  And none of it was enough. The monsters kept pouring in, two for every one that was cut down. The only limit to how many could pour in seemed to be the size of the portal and the size of the room itself. Nan and the others were pushed back into the corner—she couldn’t tell what was happening to the others, but the sharp cracks of the rifle volleys were growing more ragged, and the only thing she could see of Alderscroft and his group were the occasional gouts of flame rising above the heads of the beasts.

  Where’s Puck? she wondered frantically, as she hewed and hacked at the beasts two-handed, her arms aching, spattered from head to toe with gore. Roan should have alerted him the moment Sherlock brought the seventh girl to the hall. So where was he? Did he desert us after all?

  But just as that horrible thought crossed her mind, the two doors in the middle of the wall to her left burst open, unleashing an army of things most children would have recognized from fairy books on the horde of monsters.

  There were trolls, eight feet tall and looking as if they were made of stone, wielding huge clubs. There were giants even taller, who could barely make it through doors that were themselves ten feet tall. There was something Nan would have been willing to swear was a “small” dragon, and plenty more of the fiery salamanders. There were a half dozen tall warriors too, with faces the color of clay, armored in antique style and carrying thick bronze blades. There were creatures she didn’t recognize; they almost seemed to be composed of rags and sticks, with a horse-skull where the head should have been. But despite their apparent fragility, when those heads came down and rose again, it was usually with a limb between their teeth.

  Nan heard an unholy battle howl from somewhere near her waist, glanced down, and saw Durwin and Roan making good on their promise of defending her and Sarah, with little round wooden shields to protect them and swords that glowed like Nan’s own.