“Reverend Walker,” said Marlowe. “But he’s sick.”
“Go on,” said Eliza quickly, her heart in her throat. “Go on sit with the reverend. Go.”
“Are you a policeman?” said Marlowe.
“Marlowe,” she said.
“Why, yes I am, son.” The man turned his hat in his fingers, studying the boy, and then he met Eliza’s gaze. His eyes were hard and small and very dark. “Where’s the woman?” he said.
“What woman?”
He raised his hand above his head, to Brynt’s height. “The American. The wrestler.”
“If you wish to speak with her—”
“I don’t,” he said. There was a crooked chair at the wall and he set his hat down and caught his reflection in the clouded window and paused and ran a hand over his mustache. Then he looked around with a measured eye. He was dressed in a green checkered suit, and his fingers were stained with ink, like a bank clerk’s. The white flower, Eliza saw now, was wilted.
“What is it you want, then?” she said, trying to keep the fear from her voice.
He smiled at that. He folded his jacket back and she saw the revolver at his hip. “Miss Grey, there is a gentleman of some doubtful provenance, residing at present in Blackwell Court, who’s been asking all across Spitalfields about you. He says you are the recipient of an inheritance, and he wishes to locate you.”
“Me?”
His eyes glittered. “You.”
“It can’t be. I got no kin anywhere.”
“Of course you don’t. You are Eliza Mackenzie Grey, formerly of Bury St Edmunds, under notice as a fugitive from the law for the killing of a man—your employer—are you not?”
Eliza felt her cheeks color.
“There’s a considerable reward out. No mention of a child, though.” He looked at Marlowe with an unreadable expression. “I don’t much imagine the gentleman will want him too. I can find a suitable position for him somewhere. Apprentice work. Keep him away from the workhouses. It would be a sight better than here, with your dying reverend and his crazy American.”
“Brynt isn’t crazy,” said Marlowe from the corner.
“Sweet,” said Eliza desperately, “you go on over to Cowett’s and ask for Brynt, all right? Tell her the reverend wants her.” She went toward the door to usher him out when she heard a hollow click, and froze.
“Step away from the door now, that’s a girl.”
The man had leveled his revolver in the faint gray light leaking in through the window. He put back on his hat.
“You don’t much resemble a killer,” he said. “I’ll grant you that.”
He had taken out a slender pair of nickel-plated wrist irons with his free hand from the pocket of his waistcoat, and in a moment he was alongside her, grabbing her roughly by the arm, fastening the irons at her right wrist and reaching for her left. She tried to resist.
“Don’t—” she tried to say.
Marlowe, across the room, got to his feet. “Mama?” he said. “Mama!”
The man was pushing Eliza toward the door, ignoring her boy, when Marlowe came at him. He looked so small. She watched almost in slow motion as he reached up and grabbed the man’s wrist with both his little hands, as if to hold him back. The man turned, and for what seemed a long moment to Eliza, though it could not have been more than seconds, he stared down at the boy in amazement and then in wonder and then something in his face twisted into a kind of horror. Marlowe was shining. The man dropped the revolver and opened his mouth to scream but he did not scream.
Eliza in the struggle had fallen back against the wall. Marlowe’s face was turned from her so she could not see him, but she could see the man’s arm where the boy held it, could see how it had begun to bubble and then to soften like hot wax. His neck twisted, his legs gave out, and then somehow he was pouring down around himself, gelid, heavy, thick like molasses, his green suit bulging in weird places, and within moments what had been a powerful man in his prime was reduced to a lumpen twist of flesh, his face a rictus of agony, his eyes wide and staring from the melt that had been his head.
In the stillness, Marlowe let go of the wrist. The blue shine faded. The man’s arm stood rigid out from the frozen mess of flesh.
“Mama?” said Marlowe. He looked over at her, and he started to cry.
The shabby room was very cold, very damp. She went to him and held him as best she could with the wrist irons still locked, feeling how he shook, and she was shaking also. He buried his face in her shoulder, and no part of her had felt before what was in her just then—not the horror, not the pity, not the love.