The woman turned, clapped her hands, swooped down on the workmen. “Out, out,” she called. “That’s enough for today, thank you, gentlemen, thank you.”
The house was nothing like what Alice had expected. Cheerful, warm, with all the lights burning, its parlor heavily decorated with potted ferns and draped sofas and a clutter of pier tables and even a piano in one corner, ankles dressed. It looked like the workmen had been replacing a pane of glass in a street-side bay window. The caulking was still wet. There were holes in the walls, gouges in the floor. Alice read the struggle as it must have unfolded, writ large in the ruin around her.
The day was dim as it always was in London and she didn’t see Charlie Ovid where he sat, his quiet face watching her, didn’t see him there at all until Marlowe let go of her hand and went right over and sat next to him, swinging one leg and looking shyly up at him.
“Hello, Charlie,” she said, taking off her hat. “It’s good to see you here.”
He managed a weak nod.
“Mr. Ovid is rather tired,” said Mrs. Harrogate smoothly, stepping between them. “As must you be. I’d expected you here earlier, Miss Quicke.”
She shrugged. “Slow crossing.”
“Mm. It would appear so.”
With the workmen gone, Mrs. Harrogate took off her veil. She crouched in front of Marlowe and took his chin in her hand and turned his face side to side.
“Marlowe,” she murmured. “We’ve been looking for you for a long time, child. My name is Mrs. Harrogate. It is my job to see you safely back to where you belong.”
Alice could see he was nervous. He was instructed to unloop his suspenders and lift his shirt so Mrs. Harrogate could examine the birthmark, and then she stood and interlocked her fingers over her belly and stared. Alice frowned, uncertain. Her task had been only to locate and escort the child but she found herself uneasy with Mrs. Harrogate’s manner, as if the woman were checking out a horse she wanted to buy.
But then Mrs. Harrogate turned away, as if losing sudden interest, and asked in a cool dispassionate tone if they were hungry or tired, and led Alice across the parlor to a dressed table in front of a window. And her every gesture seemed ordinary, or nearly so, or at least neither sinister nor calculated, and Alice began to relax. She declined the cup of tea. Took off her hat, raked her fingers through her hair, rolled her neck and shoulders for the stiffness. Last of all she began to tell about the attack in the night in New York, and the burning of the circus, and the child’s shining talent, and her own healed knee.
Mrs. Harrogate’s eyelids flickered as she listened. But after that she tracked the boy’s movements with a strange voracity, like a cat to a bird, and Alice felt all her old uneasiness again.
“His name is Jacob,” said Mrs. Harrogate, turning a little spoon in her cup. Her eyes never left the boy. “Jacob Marber. He is not … like us.”
“You don’t say,” Alice said acidly.
“Mr. Coulton and I feared as much, when he did not come after Mr. Ovid.” Mrs. Harrogate breathed in sharply through her little nostrils, as if to contain her anger. “I wish you to know that Mr. Coulton’s purpose is to prevent exactly what just happened. It is for this reason he is kept on retainer. I am most ashamed, Miss Quicke. You should not have had to confront Jacob Marber.”
And Alice, who had been preparing her own outrage at being told so little, stoking it all across the Atlantic and overland to London, felt suddenly confused by the apology, mollified, and reached for a cup of tea she’d already declined.
As always, upon delivery of a child, Alice was paid in cash, twenty crisp paper notes slid into a billfold, left this time on the pier table. Mrs. Harrogate made it clear that her services were still required. As she was putting back on her hat to go, Marlowe pulled her down so he could whisper in her ear.
“Don’t leave me,” he whispered. “Please.”
She looked at his little face, his big trusting eyes.
“I’ll be back soon,” she lied.
And she went out into the fog, hating herself and the job and Mrs. Harrogate and Coulton, wherever he was, and she hailed a hansom across to her lodgings in Deptford. There she went through the rooms, looking for signs of entry, but all was as she’d left it, dim and shabby, though covered now in a fine layer of soot from the badly sealed windows. She went downstairs and paid the landlady several more months in advance and then went back up. She opened her wardrobe, changed into one of her two clean shirts, put on a new hat and then took it off and put back on her grimy traveling hat. In the cloudy mirror she studied her oilskin coat with a critical eye, fading and cracking at the seams. She pulled down a box of ammunition for her Colt Peacemaker and filled her pockets. She thought about staying the night, the rooms being so quiet, the bed simple and soft. Then she thought about Marlowe.