“Aye, and look at you. Let’s hope we don’t run into that deputy, Alwyn. His tongue’d just about touch his toes, seeing you all dolled up.”
She bit back her retort. She was still too angry to be distracted. “Is what you said in there true? That poor boy only has a few years to live?”
Coulton sighed. “Charlie Ovid will outlast us all,” he said.
“They’re all so goddamn certain the kid is like Jesus. It just makes it worse for him. Why are they all so goddamn certain he can’t get hurt?”
“Oh, he can get hurt. He just heals, is all.”
There was something in the way Coulton said this that gave her pause. “You believe it?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t see a mark on him. Did you?”
“Maybe if you’d lifted up his shirt. Or maybe his legs were all a mess. How close did you look?”
He sighed. “Close enough to know the world isn’t the way I want it to be,” he said softly. “Listen. I need you to get yourself changed, then send your trunks down to the jetty. Settle our bill. I’ll meet you at the hotel in an hour. I think we’re done with the good town of Natchez.”
Alice stopped. She stood in the grass of the empty square under a statue of some fallen Confederate general and after a moment Coulton stopped too, and turned, and came walking slowly back.
“I’m not leaving without that kid,” she said.
A carriage passed in the street, its lanterns swaying. When it was gone, Coulton stepped closer.
“Nor am I,” he said fiercely.
It was nine o’clock when they left the hotel lobby and walked along the boardwalk of Silver Street to the river and then along the back alleys to the old warehouse. It loomed up dark and rusting in the southern moonlight. They stood a long time in the shadows and then crossed the road without speaking, Coulton’s greatcoat pocket heavy and jangling. Alice kept a wary eye out for anyone on the streets. But there was no one.
It took Coulton only a minute to kneel in front of the thick door and pick the locks. He stood and looked at Alice quietly and then pulled the door open and slipped into the darkness and Alice followed. They did not carry a light, but they walked sure-footed along the passage they had been in earlier that day, and at the boy Ovid’s cell Coulton again withdrew his ring of picks and deftly twisted the locks open.
It was utterly black inside. Alice could see nothing for a long moment and she wondered what Charles Ovid could see, staring out at them, as he must be. Coulton cleared his throat and whispered, “Charlie, lad? Are you in here?” and Alice feared for a sudden long silent moment that the boy had been taken away.
But then she heard a sigh in the darkness, and the sound of chains clinking, and she saw the boy step into the faint halo of moonlight. He did not seem surprised to see them.
“Let me get these off you,” muttered Coulton.
Alice was looking up at the boy carefully. Now that her eyes were adjusting to the darkness she slipped into his cell, speaking softly and slowly. “We’re here for you, we’re here to get you out,” she said. “Will you come with us?”
But Ovid only stood looking at them in the darkness. There was something in his calm watchfulness that Alice found unnerving. “The … papers,” he whispered. His voice was low, raspy, like it hadn’t been used in a long time. “Where are they?”
Coulton blinked. “What papers? What’s he mean?”
Suddenly Alice understood. “Your letter from Cairndale. You showed it to the sheriff. Where is it?”
Coulton took the envelope out of his waistcoat, unfolded the letter. “It won’t make sense to you, lad. It’s just instructions, release papers, legal documents—”
But Ovid ignored the letter and took the envelope instead, and he ran his fingers lightly over the Cairndale crest: twin hammers crossed in front of a fiery sun. “What is this?” he whispered.
“Lad, we don’t have time for—” Coulton began.
“It’s the coat of arms for the Cairndale Institute, Charles,” said Alice. “That’s our employer. It’s who we work for.” A thought occurred to her. “Have you seen this symbol before? Do you know it, does it mean something to you?”
Ovid wet his lips. It seemed he was about to speak but then all at once he raised his face and listened in the darkness.
“He’s coming,” whispered the boy.
Alice froze.
And then she heard it too: the scrape of a man’s boots in the warehouse, approaching. She slid noiselessly to the cell door and closed it softly and leaned up against the wall behind it. Coulton took up his position beside her. He had wrapped the chains around one fist. Now the man had started to whistle and Alice recognized the whistle: it was the deputy, Alwyn.