As I finished up, I knew I’d done well. My grandmother and the Beetle might even have been proud, I thought, as I scanned the faces turned towards me. I had the lingo now. I’d heard it over eleven times, enough to take in all the patter.
The bastards.
Truly, I never knew such evil was walking the streets of London until I heard the Barons listing their assets and running through their business like they were checking the stock in a smart haberdashery. Murder to order, children, violence, beatings, robberies, blackmail, arson, even treason – name a crime and at least one of them was happy to reel it off like he was offering his grandmother’s recipe for elderflower cordial.
At the heart it was all about bodies – the quick and the dead – traded from London to Timbuktu. People bought and sold like apples on a market stall. If they had a mind to it, they’d turn Paradise and everyone in it inside out without a second thought. Jesus! And I’d thought my grandmother was a heartless bitch.
The Barons was toffs, most of them, their accents moulded at the finest schools. Even the walrus spoke like Queen Victoria herself – if she was gargling a ladle of dripping, that is.
I had a moment, I’ll admit, when the two men I’d seen in the shadows shuffled forward to offer their parable. They were joined at the hip and the shoulder. Brothers in a single coat – two arms and three legs – so far as I could make out.
The Lords Janus came from the travelling people. They didn’t speak like the others, but they didn’t have to. I reckoned their brains worked faster than anyone’s there. They quizzed a wizened old git on a point of finance – making him go through his figures over again in front of us all. They were right – he was wrong. Nearly two thousand times wrong, as it turned out. I saw his hands tremble as he offered his papers to Lord Kite, who deftly took a tinderbox from his pocket, flicked up a flame and burned them.
At the end of their parable each man (except the walrus) went forward, knelt and kissed the back of Lord Kite’s hand. He was clearly the most notable among them. As they knelt he placed a hand on their head, and pronounced a figure to be prepared and collected within the week from our agents. I supposed that meant Telferman. I made a note to ask him about it.
From my reckoning, between them they had London stitched tight as a corpse in a shroud. Mostly I could work out their particular interests by their name. Lord Kite came from the law, Lord Oak and Lord Iron from the navy and the military respective, Lord Mitre stood for the church and Lord Silver for the money. But some were more difficult to reckon until they got going and even then I found it hard to smoke a couple of them, as Sam might have said.
As I listened, I wondered what he’d make of it all.
The tall younger man, Lord Vellum, gave the impression of being very well connected, but I couldn’t catch on to some of the terms he used. And the walrus, Lord Fetch, might just as well have been speaking underwater for all the sense he made.
Most of them referred to papers, I noticed, but Lord Kite and Lord Vellum spoke free and they seemed the stronger for it. I knew I could do that. I had it all locked in my head to the last name and number, to the last brass farthing.
‘. . . And so in good faith, I humbly request that the brothers accept my first parable, given on this day, the first of May, 1881 on behalf of the chapter of Paradise.’ I bowed, and went to kneel at Lord Kite’s feet.
I’d been good. I knew it. I’d mastered my nerves and spoken clear and accurate. They were terrifying, all of them. Every man there had a soul the Devil himself might think twice about welcoming with open arms, but I’d come through and stood my ground. A part of me wondered if perhaps I could do this after all. Give them a performance, that’s what she’d told me. To my mind this wasn’t anywhere near as bad as hanging up in that cage, seventy foot over the punters without a net to catch me.
Lord Kite extended his clenched hand. There was an ugly ring on the first finger. A silver bird’s head with a cruel curved beak that stretched across the back of the middle finger, ruby studs in the place of the eyes.
I waited. I knew the words now: We accept your parable in gratitude and instruct your agent to make ready the sum of . . .
‘You are wrong.’
I caught my breath. I hadn’t made a mistake, I was certain of it.
As I stared at the back of Lord Kite’s hand he turned it over and opened his fist. The green glass earring ripped from my flesh that night at The Gaudy was in the middle of his palm. I felt something move under my hat. I didn’t realise until that moment that a scalp could actually crawl.
‘Stand.’
I gathered my skirts together, straightened up and locked my hands in front of me to hide the sudden tremor. I heard the rattle of the beads sewn onto my bag. Lord Kite reached forward to run a hand over my face, probing the set of my eyes, my cheeks and my nose as if he was trying to get a sense of what I looked like. Then, swiftly, he moved to my chin and gripped hard.
‘You are wrong to come here, and give such a . . . brazen display. Tell us how you intend to offer a fair wage in Paradise.’ He turned to the others. ‘It seems The Lady’s choice has a limited grasp of the laws of equity.’
I heard laughter and glanced along the arched rows to the side of us. They were all staring at me like hunting dogs in a kennel waiting for the master to release them. The fingers tightened.
‘Tell us how The Gaudy burned to the ground last evening.’
‘I . . . It was delib—’
He cut across me.
‘Tell us . . . about your brother.’ A muscle beneath his blind right eye twitched and just for a second I saw the mask drop. He was barely holding on to a fury that could tear the place apart if he let it free.
‘But I . . . I don’t know where my brother—’
‘Cease.’ Lord Kite let me go and clicked his fingers. The cloaked man who had guided him down the steps appeared again. As he swept past I caught the scent of him – leather, tobacco and spice. My stomach folded over on itself as I recognised that cologne. This was the man who ripped the jewel from my ear in the theatre. The man with the hawk-head cane on the roof at Pearmans Yard. The man who had torn Old Peter apart and draped his insides around the room like bloody Christmas garlands.
‘Have you prepared, Matthias?’ Lord Kite stretched out a hand and the cloaked man took it.
‘Everything is ready as you instructed.’ That voice. I knew it now – heavily accented, almost guttural.
Lord Kite nodded. ‘Come, brothers. The hour is late. Bartholomew waits.’