There was a steel in her voice that hadn’t been there before. It was the sight of Coulton, Alice knew, that had done it.
Harrogate withdrew both her long black knives and slipped her knuckles through their rings. She should have looked ridiculous, a middle-aged woman in petticoats with a killer’s weapons. Instead, thought Alice, she looked fierce, deadly. She dangled her feet over the edge, then slid down into the blackness.
“Yeah,” Alice muttered. “Perfect.”
And with a quick glance around at the dark storeroom, she swung herself down, and in.
* * *
She landed in an old sewer tunnel, a branch line, the stones slick underfoot. Mrs. Harrogate hissed for silence and Alice stayed crouching, her blood loud in her ears, straining for something, anything.
The older woman opened the shutter of the bull’s-eye lantern a crack. Her knives were held out low and flat at her sides.
“He is ahead,” she whispered. “Coulton, I mean. The keywrasse is already following. Come.”
And then the shutter snicked shut, and she heard the hiss of the older woman’s skirts, and all again was darkness.
Or almost darkness; gradually Alice’s eyes adjusted, and she could just make out the curve of the tunnel, the dark watery slime running down its middle. Other darker tunnels opened out on either side and the keywrasse would wait for them at each turning and then vanish again ahead. Alice thought of the stories she’d heard, of rats devouring people in the sewers, and shuddered. They crept on, wary, through the reeking labyrinth. Gradually a faint glow could be discerned, around a curve up ahead.
They came to an ancient chamber, part of a Roman bathhouse once, by the look of it, pillared and tiled and shrouded in shadow. A deep feeling of unease, of wrongness, was in that place. It might have been the haunt of some gang of waifs or urchins, once; the floor was cluttered with broken furniture, odd crates and boxes and junk dragged in from the back lanes of Limehouse. But good new candles burned now in brackets on the walls, their light dancing across the grotesque frescoes of bulls and half-naked boys and women in folded robes.
And at the center of the chamber, in the stone hollow where the baths had once pooled, was a man. He lay covered in blankets, on a faded green daybed, next to a small table and a collection of jars and flasks and suchlike. He was ill; slowly, with effort, he turned his head at their approach.
It was Jacob Marber.
At once Alice felt afraid. The wound in her side flared with pain.
“Margaret Harrogate,” he said softly. His voice was like dark honey and when he spoke a whispering seemed to echo up from the cavernous darkness all around. He looked at Alice, baring his strong teeth, and there was a strangeness in it.
“Ah. Is that Alice?” he said, as if they knew each other.
She shivered, putting a hand involuntarily to her side. She was not used to being afraid, and it angered her; and because of her fear, she made herself observe him carefully.
The shadows liked his eyes. That was the first thing she saw. And he was confident, too much so, pleased by his own cleverness. That was the second thing. He wore a stained black suit, his cravat rumpled, his shirt collar loose, like a gentleman back from a night in the gutters. A silk hat stood upended on the cushion beside him, gloves folded beside it, the black scarf that usually concealed his face inside the crown. Alice knew its silhouette from the quayside at New York Harbor. His beard was black and groomed and thick like a pugilist’s, and his eyes were long-lashed and beautiful. But his skin was gray, and old—far older than his years—and he was thin in the throat, and lean-cheeked, as if he had not eaten in a long time. Alice glanced around at the shadowed pillars and at the candles in their brackets but she did not see Coulton or Walter or any other. If the keywrasse was anywhere, it too had glided into the darkness and disappeared. Very deliberately, she took the revolver from her pocket and cocked it and leveled it at the sick man’s face.
“Ah,” he said again.
That was all. If he was frightened, he gave no sign.
“We saw Coulton,” she said. “We saw what you did to him.”
Marber’s eyes glittered. “And what did I do? He was dying. I saved him.”
“You killed him.”
“And yet here he is, walking this earth still. Hardly killed, Alice.” Marber’s wrists and hands were covered in tattoos that seemed to move in the candlelight. “There is much you misunderstand, I fear. I am not your enemy. I do not wish for violence between us.”
Mrs. Harrogate reached over and gently, firmly, lowered Alice’s revolver. Her own knives had been tucked away. “And neither do we,” she said.