Jacob, it thought. Jacob Jacob Jacob Jacob—
The air changed; the litch had reached the noisy darkness of White-chapel High Street. Here the scents intermingled and bled together, the reek of unwashed bodies and rotting food and animals and excrement so that it had to raise its face, and turn slowly, sniffing; but then, rising like a solitary high note above an orchestra, the litch found it again, that scent, the smell of who it’d been sent to find, and it turned east and slipped between the hansoms and the passing horses and the figures like specters in the fog.
The lighting was poor and above the pub doors hung ancient greasy lanterns illuminating the fog and the litch slid like smoke through the darkness. On the far side of Commercial Street it turned north, and crept down a deep alley with arches and slick brick walls, picking its way over the huddled forms asleep in the doorways.
Then east again, and north, down passageways and lanes and up alleys and across courts, until at last it came to stand, absolutely still, in the drifting fog. It crossed to a shadowy doorway, where a man was sleeping; he raised his elbows in irritation, and the litch—without so much as a thought—crouched and clutched the man’s forehead with one hand and smoothly drew a single sharp nail across his throat. The fellow’s shirt bloomed red; he kicked out, shuddered, fell back, and was still.
Across the lane, scarcely visible through the mist, a door was opening.
Two women stepped out onto the stoop, talking to a third still inside. The shorter woman was dressed in black and wore a veil at her face; the taller, in an oilskin coat, scanned the fog with dangerous eyes.
The litch faded back into the shadows.
* * *
Fifteen minutes later, in the muffled fog, Alice Quicke could hear through the thick silence the sound of her own boots scraping across the cobblestones—a sad, grim sound, like chalk on a coffin marking the newly dead. She strained to make out any other sound. Something made her anxious, uneasy. Mrs. Harrogate walked beside her, head bowed, a silhouette lost in thought. In the older woman’s handbag lay the two heavy keys, but it was not the keys that worried her. Every few feet Alice would glance over her shoulder, the hairs at the back of her neck prickling.
Something was following them.
She was sure of it, sure as anything. A cutthroat, maybe; maybe worse. She thought of what Susan Crowley had said about Henry Berghast and smoothly cocked the hammer of her revolver in her pocket and held it tight. But nothing emerged out of the fog, and she said nothing to Mrs. Harrogate, and they walked on until the older woman waved for a hansom and a cab stopped creaking in the soupy dark and both women climbed up. Then the cabman slashed his whip and the skeletal horse rattled and lurched on.
Back at their lodging house, with the window firmly shut and locked, Alice wrestled out of her long coat and slung her hat on the unmade bed and frowned.
“We weren’t alone,” she said. “Leaving Susan Crowley’s rooms. There was someone following us.”
Mrs. Harrogate, unpinning her veil, then removing her shawl, stood very still. She looked at Alice as if weighing a purchase, considering its worth. Alice didn’t like it. “Did you feel anything, in your side?” Mrs. Harrogate asked curiously.
“No.” She put a hand to her ribs. “I haven’t sensed anything since we arrived here. What if it doesn’t work? What if I can’t find Marber?”
“You won’t need to. The keywrasse will do the finding.”
Alice sat on the edge of the bed in the yellow gaslight, she pulled off her mud-encrusted boots. She wasn’t sure the woman’s meaning but decided to leave it. She had more pressing questions. “Why is Marber so interested in Marlowe?” she said. “Why would he kill the parents at all?”
“Because the child is powerful. And because the drughr is interested.” Mrs. Harrogate’s eyes were lost to shadow where she paused, folding her shawl at the wardrobe, and Alice saw the older woman’s reflection in the looking glass pause also. Her tone softened. “Forgive me. Miss Crowley’s account was … disturbing. Much of it I did not know. And I do not like to be surprised.”
“You believe her, then?”
“You do not?”
Alice thought about it. “She wasn’t telling everything, but that doesn’t mean what she said was a lie. She made it sound like Berghast scares her most. Not Marber or the drughr.”
“Only one who does not know the nature of the drughr would believe that.”
Alice took this in.
“Remember,” Mrs. Harrogate went on, “it’s not Henry Berghast who hunts children, who seduces away talents, who betrays and murders the likes of Frank Coulton. We are here for one purpose only. We shall see it through.”