The first hansom refused on account of their appearance and the second refused to take the cat. The third was shabby and stained and charged her double but it took them directly to 23 Nickel Street West. Alice got out, ignoring the driver’s disapproving look, the way he knuckled back his cap and sniffed, as if she and Mrs. Harrogate had been out drinking or worse. The driver didn’t offer any help. Alice hauled Mrs. Harrogate through the iron gate and inside.
The house was dim, still. The keywrasse sniffed at a table leg, then vanished into the spill of shadow from the hall beyond. A door stood open. A stuffed boar’s head on the wall hung undisturbed above a curtain. Alice waited a moment, listening. Then she carried Harrogate up and settled her in her bed, and at a basin she washed her own face and greasy hair, and then she went back downstairs and out into the street. She found a crossing sweep in front of Blackfriars Bridge and she gave the shivering lad two shillings and told him to fetch a doctor fast as he could. She held a third up between her fingers and told him it was his when the doctor arrived.
Then she went across to their rented room and collected up their things and settled with the landlady and dragged everything, roughly, through the intersection to No. 23.
Her head was aching, her knuckles were sore, the pain in her ribs was worse. She sat downstairs and waited for the doctor. He was an old man, Irish, out of breath even before climbing the stairs, and he sat with Mrs. Harrogate and pulled out a pocket watch and took her pulse and lifted her eyelids and frowned. He felt her knees; he turned her legs carefully at the hips. The crossing sweep lurked in the doorway, all eyes and grime, the third shilling in his fist.
“It was a fall from a horse,” said Alice, standing. “She can’t feel her legs.”
“Some fall,” the doctor grunted. He ran a hand over his whiskers. “And all these scratches?”
“Twigs. She was thrown in the park.”
He picked something from his tongue. Tobacco. Then he unhooked his spectacles, tired. “She’ll not walk again,” he said bluntly. “I’m sorry.” He took from his bag a small vial of medicine. “For the pain,” he said.
Alice was past weeping. Weariness was all. She didn’t know what to do; it was a feeling she wasn’t used to, and she didn’t like it. When Harrogate awoke, moaning, Alice administered the medicine, and the older woman fell back again, and slept again, and Alice washed the blood and dirt from Mrs. Harrogate’s face and throat and left her. The last night she’d spent in this house, Coulton had still been alive, and she’d spent it sitting upright in the little room down the hall watching Marlowe’s and Charlie’s faces as they slept. That was in her too, and she didn’t know what to do with it.
The keywrasse came to her all that day and rubbed against her ankles and leaped into her lap, purring. She would run a hand along its fur and scratch behind its ears and look down at it, a long wiry creature, its four golden eyes narrowing, and she would suppress a shudder, remembering what she had seen in that underground chamber, the size and many-legged frenzy of it.
“What are you?” she would murmur, stroking it. “You know Margaret is scared of you? Yes she is. Maybe I should be too, hm? What are we going to do, little one? How can we stop Marber now? I don’t even have both your weir-bents anymore.” She stared out the window at the poisonous yellow fog. “Margaret said you’ll get strange if we can’t lock you back away.”
She was just talking, murmuring to herself. But something came to her then, almost like a sound, except it was in her mind. A flash of pain, an image all red in color, a sudden quick flare of understanding. I am, I am, I am. The voice was in her head, soft, accentless, insistent. Then it was gone and there was something else, a kind of knowing: somehow Alice understood that the keywrasse was not only trapped by the weir-bents, made captive, as Margaret had explained, like a fish in a bowl—but also that it was wrong, deeply wrong, and that the poor creature oughtn’t to be locked up. It ought to be free.
Her hand fell still. She was staring down at the keywrasse in shock. “What— Was that … Is that you?” she whispered. “Are you talking to me?”
The keywrasse flicked an ear, purred.
She stood abruptly and the creature leaped down, padded to the corner of the sofa, paused. Its tail stood high.
It can’t be, thought Alice, watching it in fear. Surely not.
The next day she left the keywrasse locked in the front parlor and went out into the fog, alone. Though it was yet early, the mists had deepened, the streets were darker now but for the corona of lanterns, the blur of figures hurrying past. She came back with two small barrow wheels, of hooped iron and with stout oak spokes, and a small black case of woodworking tools. And she upended one of the contraptions stacked in the back bedroom and set about sawing and measuring and hammering. It was clean work and it gave her something to do. Her strong wrists were sore and scabbed where Coulton had attacked her but the pain didn’t bother her. She was remembering something from her childhood at Bent Knee Hollow. There had been a woman there, very old, no longer able to walk, who had been put into an old wooden wheelbarrow, surrounded with cushions and blankets, and wheeled out to the bonfires every Sunday to be with the others. She was remembering that, and thinking of poor Mrs. Harrogate, a cripple now, and it felt good to be doing simple work again, work that had an end.