“Ah.”
“He was from here. I know it.”
“From London?”
“No, ma’am. From here.”
Margaret frowned, unsure of the boy’s meaning. She glanced across at Coulton, who was listening intently. She was going to ask more but something stopped her, some instinct she had learned long ago to trust and to listen to, and instead she brushed her hands on her skirts and turned away. “That’s fine, Charles, thank you. Now, I want you to concentrate. I know you’re tired, but I have one last question for you. What is it you want, Charles?”
The boy’s head drooped suddenly, then jerked back up. “I don’t want to be hurt anymore,” he said. His words were thickening.
“How much powder did you give him?” asked Coulton. “I reckon he’s about finished here. Did you get what you needed?”
Margaret nodded.
“I want to know what he looked like … what my father looked…，” mumbled the boy. “I want to hear Mama’s voice again, I can’t remember her voice.…”
She unlocked the manacles on the chair, helped Coulton lift him, stumbling, to his feet. He was thin, gangly, his legs folding sideways under his weight.
“The poor thing,” she said, stepping back. “All of them. They deserve better from us.”
* * *
Charlie Ovid awoke in the parlor, on the velvet sofa, his arms folded up under his head. A fire burned in the grate. His head was aching. He lay still, trying to remember the examination, what had happened.
Wind was in the flue of the fireplace, like a low keening. A drunk was singing faintly streets away. Horses clopped by on the cobblestones outside. A slow steady dap of rain sounded against the window, easing for a time, coming back.
He shifted uncomfortably, then sat up in the gloom. He ran a hand over his face. Even at night, it seemed, Blackfriars seethed with life. Someone had opened the window a crack, and the rainy air left a chalky taste in his mouth. His nostrils when he picked at them were crusted with a black rime. He’d never known anything like this place, this London, the magnitude of such a city built by human hands, old, yes, impossibly so, like it had always been there, and going on for miles and miles like the great brown Mississippi he loved, and the filth, and the deep vanishing alleyways and crooked lanes and shadowy stairs into cellars where figures emerged like apparitions, all of it, only just glimpsed through the murky rain at speed as the hansom splashed its way through the crowded streets from St Pancras Station—
What was the matter with him? He rubbed at his wrists. Mrs. Harrogate had seemed pleased, in that creepy room in the cellar. He didn’t trust her, of course, the way she glided in her black dresses soundlessly over the floor, her gaze dark, unblinking, the disturbing purple mark across her weathered face. No, he thought sharply, that wasn’t fair of him, he knew what it was to look different too. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that when she looked at him she was sizing him up, weighing him like a sack of dry goods for the value. Oh, he didn’t trust Mr. Coulton much either; it was true. But at least he’d watched that man closely, and he’d come to believe he was a good man, whatever that meant. A man ruled by compassion is how the young pastor at his church might have said it. He supposed they’d both retired to their bedrooms upstairs, up where that creature too slept, that litch, tied and drugged, its gray-blue skin and bloodred lips like a thing out of a nightmare. Charlie lay back down, wondering about it, and the institute, what it all would be like. It filled him with dread.
And that was when he heard it.
A door, somewhere in the house above him, creaking open. Slowly. But no footsteps followed, no squeaking of the floorboards. He waited. No one came.
And then he heard a soft scrabbling sound, like little claws on wood, and he sat up and stared hard at the stairs leading up into the house.
Nothing. The grandfather clock made out of bone ticked out its soft seconds. No other sound beyond the rain at the glass. He got up and walked to the base of the stairs and put a hand on the banister and listened.
“Mr. Coulton, sir?” he called up. “Mrs. Harrogate?”
There was no answer.
In the stillness, he started up the stairs. The second-floor landing was dark, silent. So was the third floor. But on the fourth floor, the door to the litch’s room stood open. Beyond lay an absolute darkness.
Charlie stopped, his heart beating fast.
“Mister?” he called softly. “You awake?”
Something pale and indistinct then moved at the top of that room’s doorframe, as if it had been waiting, waiting for him, a blur against the darkness. It slid down into view and hung there, upside down, looking at him with huge black eyes. Charlie stared back, uncomprehending. And then slowly, very slowly, the thing bared its long teeth, and something shifted in Charlie, a terror, and he opened his mouth to cry out for Mr. Coulton, or Mrs. Harrogate, anyone, but no sound came.