The pair remained in the alley while they ate their meal. Luckily the rats had vacated, so their crumbs didn’t attract any unwanted guests. A few of the singers who’d been auditioning exited the stage door but didn’t give a second look to a man sharing a pie crust with a hairy dummy.
“A glass of ale wouldn’t have gone amiss,” said Hob, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Aye, but you’ve got a full belly for the night, have ye not?” Ian brushed more crumbs off the front of his jacket as the clatter of well-shod horse hooves on the road attracted his attention. “Ah, here’s our man, and early too,” he said as a hansom cab pulled up in front of the alley entrance. “Time for you to go.”
A man of middling authority in a black frock coat and silk hat and carrying a walking stick stepped out of the cab. Ian didn’t recognize him, but he did note the lack of credentials pinned to his lapel. Dressed like a physician or a gentleman out on business, he drew little attention to himself other than from the mildly curious wishing to see why a hansom would stop in front of a narrow alleyway beside an East End music hall. They’d sent a rookie, right enough, pulling up to the spell’s epicenter. It was a boy’s magic trick he’d done, so they couldn’t have expected the constable would find anything more than a rowdy youth practicing magic in a public street as a prank. Which made the man’s mustachioed face appear all the more hilarious, once it scrunched up in realization that the culprit he’d come to chastise was actually a grown man in a tweed jacket.
“You there, what’s the meaning of this?”
Ian stood and approached the constable with his hands held open before him. “A bit of harmless fun, is all. Wanted to eat a meal without having to share with the rats.”
The officer looked left and right, then signaled him forward with his walking stick. With a gloved hand he removed a leather wallet from his breast pocket, displaying identification that bore the official insignia of the Witches’ Constabulary. It was accompanied by a grainy black-and-white photo of himself without his mustache.
“Constable James Bottomfield,” Ian read out loud. “A pleasure.”
“What’s next, a parade of pixies down the queen’s high street?” Bottomfield flipped the ID closed and returned it to his pocket, then gave Ian a sniff as though checking to see if he was drunk. “You ought to know better than to perform a spell on a city street. Your rats have marched straight past the tower, down the embankment, and on to the public square. Made three circles around the monument, then ran like their tails were on fire.” He twitched his mustache at Ian. “That’ll make the papers, it will.”
Ian shrugged. “The area seemed overdue for a good purge.”
“Right.” Bottomfield jerked his thumb toward the carriage. “Come on, you’ll need to take a ride with me to explain yourself to the chief inspector. And hurry up about it. We don’t want anyone seeing him,” he said, pointing up at Hob, who clung to the top of the lamppost.
Ian waved at Hob to get out of sight, then stepped into the cab. The constable jumped in beside him and tapped the roof three times with his walking stick, and the carriage took off. It was a comfortable cab, lined with velvet and leather and smelling of boot polish. Elegant enough, considering the seat was most often occupied by those who defied the laws of the three kingdoms.
Half a mile later it was clear Bottomfield was taking him back to the city center. The carriage driver veered them into the path of one of the city’s busiest commercial thoroughfares, where they joined the throng of foot and wagon traffic. There, a dismal bank of clouds sank over the tops of the buildings, smothering the street in gray fog and the threat of rain. Their carriage, one of a hundred black coaches jockeying for space on the grim thoroughfare, pulled to the left and stopped astride a statue of a dragon that had been planted atop a plinth in the middle of the road. The officer hopped out on the left in front of a black door. Above it was a plaster relief of a lion, a dragon, and a unicorn standing over what, to most mortals, might appear as swords but to the witch’s eye were actually crossed wands symbolic of the Constabulary. Bottomfield advised Ian to follow him inside without incident as he stamped his walking stick on the pavement. Not being a fool, Ian complied as the coachman, amid calls for the daft bastard to get off the road by the other carriage drivers around him, drove away.
Inside, the constable led Ian down a short corridor lit by candles suspended in a wrought-iron chandelier. He noted the beige paint on the walls was as clean as freshly churned butter and the wooden wainscoting polished to a rich mahogany gleam. He almost felt ashamed when the nails on the soles of his tackety boots broadcast his every step on the white marble floor underfoot.