“Until you needed her, that is.”
“Indeed.”
“So. How do we begin?”
“You will sleep,” replied Margaret, at the window. “That is your task. You must get yourself strong. I will go down among the exiles and make inquiries.”
“Alone?”
Margaret smiled thinly. “I did not require your protection before we were acquainted, Miss Quicke. And I do not require it now. I will return in the morning with what we need.”
“Right. The weapon you say can kill Marber.”
Margaret inclined her head.
But to acquire it, she had first to find it. She knew Jacob Marber would not have forgotten about it, either. It was late when she left Miss Quicke sleeping in the lodging house. She slid out through the open window into the cold fog and dropped cautiously off the low wall and made her way east, to Bluegate Fields, her heart loud in her chest. The fog and the hour made the streets very dark. She had little patience for her own fear but it was there nonetheless, and real, and not always easily mastered. A fine result it would be, she thought, her out here and being stabbed on account of a few shillings in her purse. In Wapping, she drifted along the walls of sleeping indigents with a bull’s-eye lantern outstretched in her fist until she found who she was seeking, a mean-looking boy in rags and grime. He could have been waiting for her, crouched as he was, barefoot, green eyes turned toward the light. He took her coin and led her down a maze of dripping alleys until they came to the rooms of Ratcliffe Fang.
She hadn’t seen Fang in years: hunchbacked; a long, narrow skull fringed with long greasy hair; fishlike eyes bulging behind wire spectacles. Cotton gloves with two fingers cut out. His long wrists stuck out from his rags, hairy and bony, like an ape’s. But he knew things others did not, and he walked the darkest lanes in London unaccosted and unafraid.
“Margaret Harrogate,” he grunted, when he opened the door. “Come in, and welcome. You’d best not stay long. There’s them about what’s been askin after you.” His rooms were filthy, reeking of the rivers of muck just outside his doorstep, the floors sticky and creaking. He stumped back to his coal fire, drawing his blanket fast. “Shall I send round the corner for ale?”
Margaret declined. She sat with her handbag in both hands and told him what had happened on the train to Scotland, the slaughter Jacob Marber had caused, the child who had stopped him.
It was enough; she didn’t need to say more.
Fang blinked and blinked in the firelight. “Do he understand about the child? Who he is?”
“Perhaps not yet. But he knows the boy is important. As for the boy, I am afraid for him, and of him. I shall kill Jacob Marber, Mr. Fang, but it is the boy I fear.”
Ratcliffe Fang folded his fingers in front of his long face. “Ah,” he said.
And Margaret listened then as he told her of the rumors raging through the flash world of Limehouse.
“They say there’s creatures about, preying on those what ain’t careful. At the docks, in the tunnels, under the arches. They say bodies is being found, mauled up, ripped to pieces. And there’s unhappier rumors about, them what’s sayin it’s a man made out of smoke been at eating the bodies, drinking out the blood. An evil business, it is. I don’t need to tell you what it means. The constables ain’t looking into it just yet as it ain’t anybody what matters, not to the City. Just knifemen and jillies and the like. But give it time. Already the locals go about in packs, terrified. Even the lighters and the fingersmiths is terrified, come dark.”
Limehouse, thought Margaret with interest. That was close by. “What about the institute? What is said of it?”
“There’s no gossip about Cairndale nor Berghast neither. Not in the flash world. Maybe there’s some few heard of it, but they don’t know nothing. The prevailing theory in the acre is it’s Spring-Heeled Jack an his demons.” Ratcliffe Fang ran his tongue over brown teeth. “It’s them litches, course, what’s making all the fuss.”
“Litches? More than one?”
“They say there’s a pack of the creatures. Hunt at night, like wolves.”
“They’re mistaken. Tell me, what do you think Jacob intends to do, Mr. Fang? Why has he returned now?”
“That I can’t imagine. But there’s purpose in it. Jacob Marber had a quick intelligence, but it wasn’t never what guided him. His heart was just different. Every evil act he done, he done because of his heart. I don’t expect he’s ever got past the death of his little brother, to be honest. What do he intend to do? Nothing, I think, on this side of the orsine. But the gray rooms is closed to me, Margaret, an I try to concern myself with the things of this world. You know that. Lord knows they’re foul enough. But you never come all this way to hear me opine on Jake Marber’s character.”