She kept telling herself that, over and over, as if it might help. But she didn’t move. She was clinging to the very back of the train, watching the tracks scroll out behind her. She hated fast-moving things. Horses. Passenger liners. But being perched in the open platform at the back of a speeding train was maybe worst of all.
She’d picked up her voluminous skirts and ran for all she was worth down onto the tracks when she saw the conductors and engineer swinging back up into the stopped train, the sun at her back, her shadow long before her, and she’d just reached the step of the last car and heaved her great bulk up when the brakes groaned and the train started rolling again, gathering speed. She gripped the railing, gasping. She was sure someone must have seen her. But the train didn’t slow, no porter came running back to shout up at her, and they were away.
Thing of it was, she’d seen that man, the shadow man, burst into smoke as the locomotive thundered through him. The engineer had seen it too, had braked hard and gone hunting under the wheels for the bits of him. She’d watched him walk the length of the train, swipe his cap from his head, squat, peer under each car. He’d found nothing, neither he nor the conductors, no part of the man. She’d watched this and thought about the smoke curling the length of the locomotive and its coal car and then vanishing. Whatever else, it wasn’t suicide. That man—monster, whatever he was—somehow had got on board the train. Which meant Marlowe must be on it too.
Such had been her thinking, at least, as she lay in the long grass watching. But now, as she clung to the rear step of the postal coach, her thick braid battering away in the rush, her face screwed up in a grimace, it seemed near madness. Men didn’t just explode into clouds of smoke. Circus ladies didn’t go leaping up onto moving trains.
That was when she heard a muffled thump, as if something heavy had been thrown against the inside of the mail coach. She went very still. Then it came again, more violently. There was the clear unmistakable sound of a struggle inside. Brynt pressed her ear up against the locked door. Nothing.
And then something punched the wood siding of the car near her head, sounding like an angry wasp, leaving a small black hole. A bullet.
“Dear God in heaven,” she whispered. Swaying from side to side, scrabbling away. And then a single clear thought formed in her head:
Go.
And Brynt checked her grip, glared up at the lip of the roof, and started to climb.
* * *
Alice shoved the rattling carriage door wide, pushed Marlowe through, out of the wind, then reached a hand back for Charlie Ovid. She couldn’t see Jacob Marber yet.
They didn’t stop. It was a carriage holding several more private compartments and they ran past all of them, stumbling from side to side as the train rattled on, the occupants turning one by one to stare in surprise as they passed. Alice kept glancing fearfully back. At the rear of the car she opened the door, stepped into the same familiar platform, the roar and clatter of wind and ties, and she lifted Marlowe across and then climbed over the railing and jumped across too. The next carriage was a third-class carriage, crowded, noisy, with wooden seats arranged in rows. The air was thick with pipe smoke and the creaking of newspapers and women in shawls shouting across the aisle at each other. Alice and the boys were all three disheveled now, wild-looking, with their heads bared. She took out her gun, not caring, and then she heard a quiet descend and she looked up. Row upon row of faces, pale, were staring at her. She hurried the two boys down the aisle, toward the back, ignoring the forward-facing passengers. Her forearms were sluggish and throbbing from the climb, and she was out of breath. She saw some of those she’d seen on the London platform, the two widows in black with their tight bitter faces, the man with the birdcage staring as they passed.
They were three rows from the rear when the door in front of them opened and Coulton came through. He’d lost his bowler hat and his ruddy face was flushed and his eyes were dark.
“You left us, you son of a bitch,” she said. And shoved him hard in the chest.
He peered past her at the two kids. “You’re all okay?”
“No,” snapped Charlie.
Alice put a hand on the boy’s sleeve to calm him. Passengers were staring. “Marber’s behind us,” she said. “We can’t stop here. Hurry.”
“Jacob is—？” Coulton gripped her shoulders, looked hard in her face. “Did you say—？”
But then he went silent, his glower sliding off her and along toward the front of the railway carriage. Alice turned to follow where he was looking.