Wallaby entered the breakfast room still drying his hands after washing up the dishes. “Will you be off to look for that fella, then?”
“I wouldn’t know where to begin at this point.” Ian threw his napkin on the table. “Is there anything else you can tell me about George Elvanfoot? Anything at all?”
“I’ve told you all I remember. It were just the one hour he were here.”
“How did he appear to you that night?”
“Well, you saw the state of him. ’Twas a right mess he was in.”
It was too much to try and explain why he had no memory of the events. Instead, Ian slid the photo of George in his costume across the table. “Perhaps you could recall how he was dressed when he was here?”
“To be honest, I nearly didn’t let you in,” Wallaby said. “Your mate smelled like he’d been rolling around in the gutter. Imagine he’d been sleeping rough and drinking. We’re a boardinghouse catering to witches, sure, but we’re no home for feral dogs wandering in off the street.”
“His outfit?” Ian pressed.
Wallaby peered closer. “No, he weren’t in no top hat or cape. I believe he were wearing a long gray coat, though ’twere dirty as a coal porter’s. And he weren’t wearing nothing as fine as that sparkly pin in his lapel.”
Ian looked closer at the pin. It struck him for the first time that George was wearing the thistle pin in both photos. An item like that must have some significance for a man to wear it in two separate photos, one in costume and one as himself. He reasoned such a thing could easily have been lost on the street. Or pawned. Actors made little enough money, and yet its absence nagged at his intuition. “Thank you,” he said and took a last swallow of tea.
He was still pondering the missing pin when Hob popped up out of a coal scuttle near the fireplace. The little fellow shook off, creating a cloud of black dust.
“Hob? What the devil are you about now?”
“They are looking for you,” Hob said. “Miss Blackwood and Sir Elvanfoot.”
The peculiar pairing of names unsettled him. “What? Where? Henry Elvanfoot has arrived in the city? They’re together?”
Hob twirled his finger and the dust lifted off him, swirling into a funnel that emptied back into the scuttle the moment he hopped out. “So many questions.” The little imp grabbed a scone off the table and broke off the corner to eat. “He is at the shop with milady. They await you there, but it is set to be a sorry affair.”
“But how? Never mind. Come, we must go.”
“Not I,” Hob said, unbothered by the crumbs falling out of his mouth. “I’m to go north and fetch Sir his books first.”
“His books? Whatever for?”
“What does one ever need books for? To read what is not already in the head. ’Tis the other Miss Blackwood who has roused him to it, methinks.”
“Very well, I’ll meet you there.” Both had turned to go their separate ways when Ian stopped, baffled by what he’d heard yet again. “By the way, why do you call Miss Blackwood ‘milady’？”
Hob jumped in the coal bin and shrugged. “It would be rude not to.”
While he suspected there was more to it, the elf’s logic could not be argued with, so Ian bid his mate safe travels. After consulting with his pocket watch to check the street, it took a mere five minutes for Ian to walk to the shop. Curiously, the boy with the dirty face and head full of nursery rhymes was propped against the window again. Ian approached the shop front and peered through the glass as if window-shopping for a new spoon, pretending to ignore the boy.
After a few moments standing side by side, the boy was the first to comment. “You back again?” He grinned and shook his head as if to imply Ian was some kind of nutter.
“Do you make it your business to keep track of who comes and goes in this shop?” Ian asked, still paying the boy little noticeable attention.
“It’s my street then, innit?”
“So it appears,” Ian said somewhat more amiably, finally glancing down at the boy. “All right, Mr. Clever Clogs, how many times do you reckon you’ve seen me enter this shop?”
Before the boy could answer, a cry of “Murder!” was shouted in the street. The call came from the paperboy on the corner as he cut the twine on a bundle of newly delivered papers. “Murder on Dorset Street!” he shouted again to drum up business. “Brick Lane Slasher strikes again. Read about it in the Daily Gazette. Renegade rats run rampant in the public square. Read about it in the Daily here!”