Edwina and Ian watched the boy respond to her sister. It was uncanny how they’d missed the telltale signs before, the way he clung so closely to Mary. He was a bright lad. Shrewd. Sharp. But looking deeper into the hollow of his eyes, it was obvious he was tangled up on the wrong side of the veil between life and death. Where his feet ought to have been buried in one world and his spirit in another, the two remained together in an ethereal ghostly form intense enough to manifest on Ian’s sensitive timepiece.
“It isn’t George who’s coming, is it?” she asked.
“Nae.” Ian snapped his watch shut and tucked it out of sight. “We really should go,” he said to Edwina with more urgency.
“Yes, I think you’re quite right.” She lifted the hem of her skirt, ready to flee, when two young men emerged from the damp and sour corridor at their rear carrying a wooden club and a stout stick. One wore a crushed top hat, while the other smiled with crooked teeth too big for his mouth. A second pair of ragged lads showed their faces in the alley opposite. The first swung a police truncheon in his grip. The second flashed a bowie knife. The metal glinted in the starlight for Edwina as bright as quicksilver.
“Don’t be leaving yet,” the young man with the knife said. “We still got some unfinished business after that stunt you pulled on the embankment.” He stared with eyes as pale as winter and raised the knife.
The youth who’d tried to rob them on the foreshore!
“Ian, it’s them.”
“So it is,” he replied. He shifted their position to better keep track of where everyone stood. The four young men advanced as the boy grinned beside Mary as if he were at a carnival.
“I see you’ve still got that lovely gold watch,” said the hooligan in the smashed top hat. He banged his club against the chipped bricks to punctuate his intentions.
They’d been surrounded, drawn into a secluded courtyard by her sister’s coordinated and deliberate escape. But what was she doing with these street thieves?
“Don’t know about you,” Ian said in Edwina’s ear, “but I’m starting to think it’s no coincidence we’ve been set upon a second time by these ruffians.”
He was being facetious at a most inopportune moment, but the point struck home. It was no coincidence. Not the boy, not the lads turning up, and not the bloody items they had found in her sister’s trunk.
“Mary, what is this?” Edwina called out. “Do you know these young men?” The lads did not advance, yet the feeling of threat grew, much as it does when a dog begins to snarl before the bite.
“Oh, they live here.” Mary licked her fingers so that her lips shone from the oily fish residue. She flicked her eyes toward the landing. “Up there somewhere.”
Seeing as they were in much the same situation they’d been in before, caught between one bad option and another, Edwina deferred to Ian. “Well, what poem shall you recite to keep them at bay this time?” She cast a wary eye at the thief holding the knife and took a step closer to Ian. “Somehow, comparing them to a summer’s day doesn’t seem quite fitting.”
“Have you more fine words for us, then?” The lad in the top hat shook his head and gaped at his partner. “Go on, you nutter.”
Ian had squared his feet, ready to give him what he wanted, when an upstairs door swung open. The dandy, the lad who fashioned himself the leader of this ragtag gang of thieves, slammed the door shut and stepped onto the landing, strutting as if he were an actor entering the stage. He buttoned his plaid jacket like a man going off to work, squinting at them below in the gloomy soot of the courtyard. The late evening twilight betrayed him, revealing the sparse stubble of a young man perhaps in the last year of his teens, but his worn countenance was one of a life lived ten times that.
“Oi,” he shouted. “That’s no way to treat our guests.” The young man came down the stairs, stopping at the bottom to let his eyes trail over Mary before facing Ian and Edwina. The boy lit up, smiling and waving, but the mortal could not see him.
“Nick’s my brother,” Benjamin said proudly, pointing with his thumb. Mary patted him on the knee to shush him.
“What we got here, then?” Nick, as he was called, smoothed his hand over his chest, drawing attention to the mother-of-pearl buttons dazzling his jacket front. Edwina recognized the buttons at once from the shop. The ones Mary had claimed to have sold. She feared they, too, had likely been snapped off a dead man’s coat.