They needed to get back. He turned to go inside when something stopped him, a feeling; and he peered down and glimpsed movement in the square below. A pale hairless figure, lurking under the strange white tree in the fountain.
And that was when he heard the scrape of shoes on wood, somewhere in the house. Someone was climbing the stairs. Inside, Marlowe had gone still. Charlie started to go to him but then froze and shrank back against the wall, his heart loud in his chest. For a shadow had filled the doorway.
It was a powerful man, all in black, vaguely familiar. He took off his hat, turned the crown in gloved fingers. Under his black beard, it was clear his mouth and cheek had been sliced open. There was blood all down his clothes. All at once Charlie knew him and shrank back.
“Hello, Marlowe,” said Jacob Marber, his voice as soft as velvet.
33
THE GRASSMARKET
A dark rain had started in the night. The cart that stopped for them in the countryside was driven by an old peat cutter who sat like a figure carved from granite, pipe clenched in his teeth, rain runneling down off his hat and beard and slicker. He grunted them up and the three of them—Komako, Ribs, and Oskar—shook the water from their cloaks and scrambled up into the bed. Lymenion, reeking, soft as wax melt in the wet, stood down in the hedgerow in water ankle-deep, watching them go, his sad misshapen face unmoving. Komako looked at Oskar. The boy’s face was turned away.
That peat cutter never spoke a word all the slow ride south into Edinburgh and they were themselves too tired to talk. It was almost morning when the cart banged to a stop on Princes Street. They were across from the Scott Monument. The three kids got down. Above them the castle loomed ghostlike in the downpour, like a city in the sky.
“Fair day to ye, then, travelers,” the cutter called down in his thick Scots accent.
Komako, with her hood still obscuring her face, raised her hand in thanks. The man snapped the reins; his cart lurched off into the early dark.
There were coal wagons already at their deliveries and the shivering poor under arches and in doorways but mostly the city just felt gray, and lonely, and quiet. Komako scanned the buildings, looking for a public house open at that hour. The sooner they got directions, the better. They had a name: Albany Chandlers. And Oskar seemed certain it lay in the Grassmarket, wherever that was.
Of course, it was still too early for the chandler’s to be open. But they could find it and wait, couldn’t they?
Oskar was limping as they started down the street. Komako stopped, put a hand on his arm. “Lymenion will be all right. You know he will.”
Oskar’s bottom lip stuck out. He was blinking away the rain. “It’s my shoe, Ko. It hurts.”
Right there, in the middle of the street, Ribs kneeled and lifted the boy’s shoe and looked at it. “You got a nail,” she said. “Come, over here.”
They crossed over to a park bench under a dripping elm and there Ribs took Oskar’s shoe and reached in with her fingers and felt around. Still holding the shoe she got up and kicked through the twigs and bracken until she’d overturned a large rock and then she came back with the rock in one hand and the shoe in the other and started banging the nail down.
Komako watched all this and then stood and looked out along the street. “What do you think they told Berghast?” she said quietly.
Ribs grimaced, her red hair plastered to her face. “Charlie and Marlowe? Nothing. They ain’t snitches.”
But Komako wasn’t so sure. “Berghast has a way of finding out what he wants to know,” she said. “You remember how he was with the chocolate, that time you snuck into the pantry?”
Ribs paused in her hammering, wiped the water from her eyes. She seemed to be remembering. “Yeah but it were worth it.” She grinned.
“What chocolate?” said Oskar. “I never got any chocolate.”
Komako’s fingertips were red in the cold and she folded them up under her armpits. “He looks so tired lately. Like he’s overwhelmed. I don’t want to make it harder for him, I don’t want him to worry.”
Ribs grimaced. “I reckon old Berghast can take care of himself, Ko. You ain’t his ma.”
“I know that,” Komako said quietly.
“I don’t trust him maybe, not like you do. But he ain’t about to hurt Charlie or Mar none. An he wants the same things we want. We ain’t working against him. Right?”
Komako chewed at her lips, thinking.
“Anyway,” Ribs added, turning her face aside to spit on the cobblestones. “I reckon he already knows we was up in his office, pokin around. An he knows we was over at the Spider. Give him five minutes an he’ll put it all together an tell us what we’re up to and what we been thinking and what we had for lunch, an even whether we liked it and would eat it again.”