“What do you want?” Charlie cried in the rain. “What?”
The litch crept forward. Its mouth was open.
“Get away from me!” he shouted. “Go on, get!”
The litch paused. For a long moment nothing happened. And then it leaped, its claws out, its teeth clicking, and Charlie, expecting it this time, fell sideways away, so that the creature only caught him a glancing blow in the side, and he struck at it with his fists as it went past, lifting it, so that it struck the stone railing at height, and went over. He could see it twisting there, dangling out over the gap, scrabbling at the bridge for purchase, finding none. Charlie was clutching his side, gasping, sobbing. He watched as the litch swung horribly out over the river and plunged down into the darkness of the Thames.
Then he slid down with his back to the freezing stone, in the very middle of the span, under a faint halo of gaslight in the rain, and he started to shake, he was shaking and shaking, and he didn’t know if the water in his eyes was the rain or him crying or what.
7
EVERY STRANGER IS A NEW BEGINNING
Alice Quicke left Remington in the graying light with the shining boy half-asleep under a blanket in the wagon, reins looped around her thick wrists. Rain was misting in the gloom, a red glow fanning up over the tree line. The shadows were long when they rode through Merville and Oaks Hollow and they slept that night in an abandoned barn on the side of the road and in the morning they went on. They saw few riders. The next night Alice lay fully clothed in the bed of the wagon with the boy curled against her for warmth, and the night after they crossed into Indiana she slept in the dirt with her back upright against an iron wheel, her chin dipped, her boots kicking at the coals of the fire as she dreamed.
In Lafayette it took her two days to sell the horse and cart. She bought third-class tickets south to Carmel and from Carmel they shared a compartment with an old lady and her lapdog all the way through to Columbus, Ohio. And nine days later Alice and the boy were in Rochester, New York. She signed the leather-bound register under the name Mrs. Coulton while the rains came slantwise against the porch, the kid dripping beside her. Under a candle-wheel chandelier the whores leaned out, their balcony in shadow, silk fans folding and unfolding in their gloves like the wings of birds.
The next morning, Alice read about the fire.
The news was old. In the noisy breakfast room she counted back the days in her head and understood it had happened six days after their going. It had started in the big top and leaped from there to the menagerie and in all eleven people and twenty-six animals had died. There was a poor linocut reproduction of a big top in flames. She looked at the boy with his plate of steak and eggs and his small serious face as he chewed while the rain tracked shadows across the dormer windows behind and cast a gloom over the table in front and she decided, devastation in her heart, that he must never know.
They spent the day in the city shopping for clothes for the boy and ate in a tea shop overlooking a park where a small fair was lighting up the dusk. Later that night she stayed awake at the window staring through the curtains, her revolver on the little table at her elbow. She again read through the article about the fire and then folded it into quarters and put it away in her sleeve, like a handkerchief. She blew out the candles. In the long puddles in the middle of the road the orange lights of the railway station rippled and danced.
Marlowe wasn’t one for talking. He’d hardly said two words all their first week of travel. She raked her fingers through her greasy hair. She thought about the fire, all those people. The newspaper had called it an accident. What would Coulton say of it? She thought of his grave pale eyes, his tired mouth. The darkness in his voice as he spoke of that man, Marber. Jacob Marber. The bounty hunter who was no bounty hunter. Behind her a black-haired boy breathed softly in the dark, alive.
Such things happened. The world was cruel. Still, something in it gave her pause. She thought of the asylum where her mother had lived out her days, the stillness of its scrubbed floors, the loneliness of its graveyard. Her mother. She tried to think of some kindness in the woman but could not. What kindness had she, Alice, shown in return? She ran a knuckle under her eyes. She didn’t even have a daguerreotype of her, any recollection of what she’d looked like in life. She was just gone, just as if she’d never existed at all. What does anyone leave behind? She looked at the boy, burrowed in his pillow. She’d get him to old Mrs. Harrogate, in London. She’d do that much. The rain was blowing in sheets against the glass. Two figures crossed the street at a stagger, hats drawn low against the gusts. In her heart lay a shadow, like dread, a presentiment of some wrongness, and she raised her hand unthinking to the folded paper in her sleeve.