Coulton put his bowler back on, turned. “The very same as you, Miss Quicke,” he said. “But our employers would not approve. Justice is just a bucket with a hole in the bottom, as my father used to say. You ready?”
Alice rubbed her knuckles.
She’d worked with Frank Coulton for thirteen months and had come nearly to trust him, as much as she trusted anyone at least. He’d found her through an advertisement she had posted in the Times. He’d climbed the water-buckled stairs of her tenement in Deptford, clutching the clipping in the pocket of his chesterfield, his breath standing out like smoke in the cold. He wished to inquire, he’d explained in a quiet voice, after her credentials. A yellow fog rolled past in the dripping alley outside. He’d heard things, he went on, had heard she’d been trained by the Pinkertons in Chicago, that she’d beaten a man unconscious with her bare fists on the East India Docks. Was there any truth to such reports?
Truth, she’d thought in disgust. What did the word even mean?
Truth: she’d survived as a pickpocket on the streets of Chicago from the age of fourteen. Truth: she had a mother incarcerated in an asylum for the criminally deranged whom she had not seen in nearly twenty years, and no other family in all the world. She was eighteen when she picked the wrong pocket and the hand that seized her wrist turned out to belong to Allan Pinkerton, private detective, railroad man, intelligence agent for the Union cause, but instead of turning her in he took a shine to her and invited her to his offices, and to her own surprise she went. He trained her in the art of undercover operatives. She did that for eight years and you could ask any of two dozen bastards sitting in jail somewhere if she was good at it and they would spit and wipe their mouths and concede it by the hate in their eyes. But when Pinkerton’s sons rose to power she was let go, all because she was a woman, and therefore delicate, and therefore not right for detective work. She put her fist through the wall of William Pinkerton’s office when he fired her.
“Your fucking wall is delicate,” she said to him.
But after that she could only get work at racetracks up and down the Eastern Seaboard and when that too dried up she bought a ticket on a liner bound for London, England, because where else and why not. There she discovered a city so dark with vice and cutthroats and foggy gaslit alleys that even a female detective from Chicago with hair the yellow of murky sulfur and fists like mallets could find plenty of doing needing to be done.
The sheriff and his deputy came down the hot street, nodding politely as they neared. The deputy was whistling, badly and off-key.
“Mr. Coulton,” said the sheriff. “We could’ve walked down together. And you must be Mrs.—”
“Miss Quicke,” said Coulton, introducing her. “Don’t let her fine looks deceive you, gentlemen. I bring her for my protection.”
The sheriff seemed to find this amusing. The deputy was cradling his rifle, studying Alice like a strange creature washed up out of the river, but there was no contempt in it, no hostility. He saw her watching and smiled shyly.
“We don’t get many visitors from overseas no more,” said the sheriff. “Not since the war. Was a time we saw all sorts of folk, Frenchmen, Spaniards. Even a Russian countess lived here for a time, ain’t that right, Alwyn? She had different customs, too.”
The deputy, Alwyn, blushed. “My daddy always said so,” he said. “But that was before my recollection. I ain’t married neither, miss.”
Alice bit back her retort. “Where’s the boy?” she said instead.
“Ah, yes. You’re here for Charlie Ovid.” The sheriff’s face darkened with regret. “Come on, then.” He stopped a moment and adjusted his hat and frowned. “Now, I don’t know I should be doing this. But seeing as how you come all this way, and you’ll be talking to Judge Diamond later, I don’t know that it’s a problem neither. But I don’t want you talking about what you see. It’s kindly a sore point around here, this boy. He’s the damnedest thing.”
“An abomination is what he is,” muttered the deputy. “Like one of them things in the Bible.”
“What things?” said Alice.
He blushed again. “Satan’s minions. Them monsters he made.”
She stopped and faced him and stared up the length of him. “That’s not in the Bible,” she said. “You mean Leviathan and Behemoth?”
“They’s the ones.”
“Those are God’s monsters. God made them.”