Myself, rather stunned

Sweet rampant figs I have absolutely no idea what day it is

I must be a target in earnest. Mr. Adelstein, newly resigned, hasn’t anything to do with himself but hunt me down. And I feel far too much like one of those wooden targets I used to shoot through, up on the Pobbles cliffs with Rosamond. She’d tug me out of our nettle-wrought gate, insist on carrying my pistols in their gleaming box – Eddie said to give you useful skills, bach! – and prop up the targets, rough boards left over from her filthy-nailed attempt to build a garden shed. I’d been petrified by the very idea of wielding a weapon (and I can only imagine the sentiments of our steward), but even my trembling nerves didn’t alter the fact that the shots went precisely where I intended them to, every time, until I could pattern out a H and an N in so many bullet-holes –

But did I truly have to begin this entry with a dissertation on my most incongruous accomplishment?

The morning’s weather was as inauspicious as I’d come to expect. The rain struck in a deluge, slapping against the windows, too dark to see beyond the splatters it left on the panes. My new, ratless bedsheets quite hadn’t warmed from a night of sleeping in them, and with the dormitory back door still propped open I doubted their chances of ever managing it – though someone had at least stuffed a bucket into the door’s gap to catch the churning downpour. Millicent and Oliver lit the mirrored candles against the gloom, strange and solemn and subdued with not a scrap of song, every other breath a darting squint to Gertie’s bed. Gertie was awake, and more or less dressed (in that she’d slept in her clothes), but she sat hunched and glowering on the edge of the mattress, draped in the yellow folds of her lambswool blanket, a bright heap of reproach.

She was avoiding my gaze, as she’d done yesterday. Calloused fingers pushed through the ends of her drooping plait.

Well. Plums. Yesterday, I had been desperate to dash into reception and meet Septimus, too flustered by that prospect to strike up a conversation with anyone else. The guilt twinged in my throat, set me blurting into the stiff silence –

“I – erm – Gertie?”

She started, a tremor beneath the blanket, but she raised her eyes. There wasn’t a scrap of a smile on that raw-lidded face, muddied to shadows in the murky room, and her voice was quite as flat and guarded as I’d feared.

“Hyssop.”

A scuffle on the floor tugged my gaze away, as if Mordred had snuck back in for another snarling brawl. Millicent and Oliver were hurrying towards the door, catching every creak in the boards with their boots, pausing only to flick a brace of eyebrows to where Gertie sat. What were they thinking? What did they imagine I planned to inflict on her?

There was nothing to do but begin, regardless. “So – I – erm – about – when – what happened – erm – at – at Checkley’s – ”

“That wasn’t so hard, was it?” she muttered, scraping me with a pitying look. Her words were terse, fragile, balancing shakily on each other’s edges. “Look, Hyssop – it was my mistake, alright? I thought you were – more like me.”

“I – I’m sorry?”

She shrugged. The blanket slipped, trickling to her elbows, stray skeins clinging to her cardigan sleeves. “’S not your fault. It was a bit of a reckless guess.”

“I – what? I – I mean – erm – not – but – just – ”

“Stop panicking, will you?” she snapped. “I only ever meant it friendly with you. I’m not going to try and woo you, or anything – ”

“Gertie!”

I dropped to my knees, and the draught clambered through the fabric of my skirt. If it brought her face closer, gave her the chance to squint through the candle-mirrored gloom and stare me out in earnest –

“If you think that I – that – that I’m in any way – erm – repulsed by your – erm – inclinations – or that I’m not like you – I – you – you quite couldn’t be further from the point!”

Finally, her face slackened. Shock plucked at her eyes, tipped her forward on the mattress to whisper at me. “You – what?”

Infinitely overdue, a scrap of blazing certainty sprinted across my forehead. Tell her. Not everything, of course – just – a sketch, perhaps, of that quiet resolve I’d glimpsed in Property’s mirror. Strung between the new-trimmed folds of my haircut, surely I could manage enough to reassure her of my sentiments, my sympathy, the wild untruth of her worst-case scenario. She couldn’t think I despised her. She quite wouldn’t.

I needed the word. Rosamond’s word, of two days and a lifetime ago, when I had Septimus’s fingers at my cheek and the first pangs of that certainty in my teeth and not a dismembering ferret in sight –

“Sapphist!”

I hadn’t entirely meant to shriek it. The heat shot up my neck in flat defiance of the freezing room, lashed about my face, dragged my eyes from Gertie’s to wilt amidst the rickety floorboards. She was gaping at me, unabashed and deservedly so.

“I – I don’t know if that’s – but – if that’s what it – erm – means – to – to – ”

“To be sweet on women?”

“Yes!” I cried – lemons, and she jumped again. “I – that is – I mean – I – that’s what I am – yes. Most definitely. Yes. Quite.”

A tentative glance up, shaky with my gasps, gave me Gertie’s open-mouthed astonishment. I quite couldn’t blame her. She hadn’t in the least asked for spontaneous confessions, and she didn’t seem remotely steady on how to respond to them. Her half-gloved fingers slumped on her knees, tumbled down from her plait.

A hopeless coda was my final gambit. “So – please don’t worry – about that – I’m only sorry that my – erm – that Rosamond was so ghastly to you – ”

“It was no more than I deserved.”

She sniffed, curled her fingers to bulky fists.

But – what?

“She was right, wasn’t she?” Gertie added darkly. “I didn’t even know it was Rosamond. And she told me right at the start I wouldn’t be her sweetheart. S’pose I was so flattered I didn’t even care. Sharp pretty girl like her, meeting me flirt for flirt – I’d’ve taken anything – ”

She caught my bewilderment, flushed, yanked her gaze down to her hands. “Should’ve known she’d change her mind. And I still had a week of her – a week of being someone’s actual priority – which is more’n I ever thought I’d get. That’s something, right?”

I’d not the faintest what to say. My very silence seemed more than answer for her. Without another glance to me, she dragged herself to her feet, twisted past me to stand at the bed’s end, slapped her hands down her cardigan to beat the wool out of its bunching. I started when the clock struck, chiming through the walls, making a sharp straining tune of half past six.

Gertie sighed, hauled on her boots. Her voice shook, faltering under the sentences, as she trudged for the door. “Sounds even worse when you put it in words. Bloody hell, I was an idiot. Well – ”

“No you quite were not!”

A fig for that clock and the ensuing tardiness. I all but toppled straight into her, scrambling off the floor with half my skirt snagged in my boot, grabbing for her cardigan sleeve – and tugging her about, once I had it, until she finally met my eyes. Amazingly, she let me do it.

“I – I know Rosamond – and – this is what she does! She changes on a whim – suddenly you’ll go from – favoured to irrelevant – just like that – and you won’t know why – and if she has a reason, she won’t tell you – ”

I swallowed, shoved the words over it. Quite no time to think on that now.

“But – please – don’t take what she does as – erm – reflective – you mustn’t believe that it indicates any inadequacy in you!”

She blinked at me. “She did it to you too?”

“I – well – sort of – ”

It was as close as I dared. The point still stood.

“But – anyway – you – you’re quite marvellous – and you’ve been nothing but welcoming to me – and I – I’m immensely grateful for it – and I’m sorry I’ve never said as much – and that I didn’t – that I left you there – and – and – ”

And, as I was bound to do the moment I noticed how many words I’d spoken, I lost the rest of it. She didn’t seem to register the strangeness of the ending, even so. It was her turn to jut out a hand, to squeeze my shoulder under the swoop of my sleeve, her face tweaking into the shaky fetch of a smile. Not her habitual grin, nowhere near, but – something entirely different, halfway into a startling shyness.

“You’re alright, Hyssop,” she murmured. “Thanks for that.”

“Oh – I – erm – of course – I’m just sorry it wasn’t sooner – I – ”

She flapped at me, spreading the smile tooth by tooth, until I bit back the last shivering monosyllables. “Don’t go stepping on it, now. You’ve got the right of it. I never hated me and mine before, and I’m not about to let her make me start. ’Cause you know what, Hyssop? I am quite marvellous. And I won’t forget it again.”

I smiled. There wasn’t more to say – she had plainly been wrapping the words about herself, with only half a thought to addressing me.

“Right, then! Another day!”

And if she felt rather more equipped to trample it than she had ten minutes ago – well, to borrow her phrase, that was something, wasn’t it?

She was already sauntering for the door, snuffing every candle she passed. “Coming? Time to fix a Division Sergeant apiece for us, I reckon!”

Then she turned back, hooked up an eyebrow I can quite only describe as a gossip in its own right. “In fact – at a guess – bit of a labour of love for you, is it?”

Figs. Of course I flushed, at roughly the same instant as my every waking thought skidded out of shape.

Septimus. Being sweet on Septimus. And my last conversation with Septimus, as horrified memory was all too eager to remind me, had been hacked to pieces on far too much incredulous yelling for my nerves to stand. I – I’d been the one yelling at her – I’d been the one scurrying away without a sensible conclusion –

“Oh – erm – quite!”

She smirked. “Called it.”

(I suppose it was only right that Gertie struck my consternation back into me. She quite wouldn’t have been Gertie Skull if she’d not utterly confounded me at least once before breakfast.)

Septimus was waiting for me, carefully ignoring Cassandra’s red-eyed stare behind the desk, just as thoroughly as Cassandra was carefully ignoring her. Septimus – of course she did – looked as brusque and as sharp and as handsome as ever: her chignon belligerently neat, her jaw set, her scowl notched sharp above her navy eyes. I got the tersest of twitchy glances, a jerk of a nod. I wondered – rather nervously – whether she meant to reprimand me for my paltry lateness, but she offered not even the shadow of a word. I had barely opened my mouth to flail for a feeble good-morning before she’d set the doors thrashing, kicking the rain in to splatter the floor. From her spot at the desk, one hand already cupped round Cassandra’s elbow, Gertie tossed a wry well-wish of a smile in my wake.

The market was a sad huddle, half-deserted, rain skidding down the awnings to pool round the stalls. The incorrigible geese had been broken at last, and now clustered together under whatever shelter they could barge into, stamping their sacking-wrapped feet in horrible frustration. The tradespeople were much the same, crammed under their awnings, glowering for the slim pickings and the lack of custom. Even the bread rolls were damp, smartingly cold and devoid of bacon, crumpling to pale moss as we ate them in silence. The lanes were all puddle, with the odd cobblestone lurking at a strange angle underwater, to snag my boot-toe and send me skittering. When we snatched glimpses of the river, it was champing its banks almost to bursting.

I recognised, after a suitably miserable trudge of time, what we were actually doing. These paths were, to the turn and the letter, the same ones we used to take – these houses the same locks she used to check – these juts towards the congealing towpath the same ones we had scrutinised, before the Head-Hider upended everything. She had, in short, committed herself with grim resignation to the Director’s orders, and restricted our activities entirely to the old shapes of the Sweetings pursuit. Judging from her pained expression, she meant the slog as a punishment – but for her, not me. Though she still hadn’t proffered a word, her stride was measured, easy to match, careful not to leave me behind.

And – small mercies! – once we’d cleared the market, there wasn’t a single foolhardy soul out in the downpour to harass us.

“Ah – Henry?”

She’d stopped us halfway down a street, vaguely recognisable around her sodden hat: it was the lane that dashed to Lorrie’s lodgings, with its drenched turnips and jostle of red-brick houses. Sullen half-light was fringing the peeling windowsills of the relevant tenement, and tracing the cracked edges on the front steps, the pale plaster streaked with a greasy smudge that could only have been the work of the rescued bicycle. She stared at the marks, teeth tugging at her lip, then dragged her eyes across to mine.

Figs.

“I – erm – yes?”

“Mind if I go in?” She nodded stiffly to the door, raindrops jolting off her hat-brim. “Ain’t heard anything from Lorrie for a day. Got to check he’s alright, that Cassandra ain’t given him any trouble. I mean – I know he can handle himself – and he’s probably fine – but still.”

I gulped the last of my bread. I had been consuming it as slowly as I could, simply for something reassuring to do. “I – of – of course – ”

“Right.” She swallowed, though she’d run out of roll hours back. “And – look. I – about yesterday. I didn’t – I never – it weren’t fair, for me to snap at you.”

Now I stared. “I – ”

“I just don’t – ain’t an excuse, I know – but you say one thing, and Adelstein says another, and something like that happens, and then – ”

The words plummeted between us like stones. No – like rain, like the rain that hadn’t stopped in the least – patching our uniforms, drowning our boots, welling cold between our fingers.

“Henry – I – I’m sorry.”

She bolted it out, flinched the moment she’d done it. One stern blink fixed her gaze on mine, but her fingers snagged each other – twisted at the deep red of her belt, at the jacket pocket where she was presently keeping her notebook, each movement the very pattern of discomfort.

“You don’t have to like me now. I ain’t – I only – I wanted you to know.”

“I – what – why would I not like you?”

Her eyes twitched, widened before she could narrow them. “What?”

Another second and the fear would throttle me. Words – quick – outmatch it!

“I quite can’t – I mean – yesterday was carnage on every possible side – but – that was yesterday – and – well – of course I don’t – I mean – it’s done – isn’t it?”

“That ain’t all of it.”

A cringe of a gasp from her. It clenched at my throat.

“I know you’ve a secret. I’ve got more evidence for that than I have on any of our cases! Adelstein thinks it’s that you want to wreck the Div from the inside. He’s given me reason after reason to believe him. And if I’d said something about it yesterday – told the Director what he thought – probably would’ve saved my own neck – but – I can’t! I don’t believe him! You’ll laugh at me, but – I trust you! I don’t know what you are – what you want from us – but – but – ”

She stopped. Right at the heart of it – as if this wouldn’t be more than enough to shatter my nerves to pieces! It was happening – so much of what Mr. Adelstein had threatened, so much of what I had feared – this was it, playing out, in the rain, in the street!

But there was the rain, and the street, and the splash of the drops into the puddles, and the rattle of a gutter overhead, and her wrenching anxious breaths, and – and me. Me. Neck-deep in the disaster, and I was still here, and Dallyangle drizzled on with bewildering indifference, and –

And she’d stopped. She didn’t believe him. Brilliantly, gallantly mad she may well have been, but she trusted me.

If I’d been braver, I would have quite unabashedly kissed her on the instant.

“Quite,” I stammered instead. “And – I – erm – you’re not wrong – no! – I mean – you are – no – he is – oh, figs – let me just – one moment – ”

She nodded, too taut for a speck of colour in her face, beyond the staring blue of her eyes. I grabbed my elbows, pressed out a gasp.

“I – well. I – it – the secret – it’s – it’s nothing to do with the Division. It’s – it’s something I want to run from – and – it’s – ”

To say it would have made it real. To say it would have noosed her into my danger, and brought Edwina’s rage down on her head (to say nothing of Mr. Adelstein’s), and compromised her beyond even the Director’s tolerance. And to say it in a street – when she needed her nerve, her concentration – when I’d already shoved her off-balance far too many times –

“It’s mine. No – erm – no threat to anyone but me. And – I certainly won’t let it be a threat to the Division!”

She frowned. “It ain’t – ”

“What?”

Her words, when they came, were positively gangly with fear, jutted out at me like that posy of flowers.

“It ain’t something I can help with?”

I could quite only gape at her.

“Police!”

Was it entirely reasonable of me to desire nothing so much in the known and conscious world as to strangle the utterer of that cry?

Septimus was gone in a lash of raindrops, smacking the puddles off the cobblestones with her battered riding-boots, and there was nothing for it but to chase her. All she’d just said – all I’d not had time to answer – I could feel it parcelling up in my mind, sliding out of sight, the opportunity folding away. Now, everything was a matter of horrendous corporeality. My sodden feet were splintering as I dashed down the street, my skirts leaden around my legs, my gasps rattling the shirt-buttons against my chest.

The yeller had skidded out of that dour establishment on the market’s edge, its large windows muffled with ebony drapes, a peeling black sign slung low over the door. Septimus had thrown herself across the threshold without glancing up, but I was limping and wretched enough to manage a bit of bleary scrutiny. As the fading white paint informed us in full florid copperplate, we were entering Fitzdegu and Daughter, Undertakers: Funerals in the Most Splendid English Style.

Oh, mellifluous ironical peaches! Were yet more Fitzdegus quite what I needed at that giddying juncture?

Three paces ahead, Septimus had already gathered up Fitzdegu and Daughter in the flesh. Both of them were wide-eyed and wraithlike with Nick’s almond skin, but infinitely neater in every respect, sleek as ravens in their jet-black work-clothes, too glossy at the fabric to be real mourning. They were the stricken images of the daguerreotype on the mauve wallpaper behind them – though the family portrait had another figure, all but their shoulder torn away vigorously enough to feather the paper’s edge, and I couldn’t recognise Nick in any of the faces. The daughter – Nick’s sister? – had her hands braced under her father’s elbows, her skinny arms starting out through slate-grey sleeve garters.

“Dallyangle don’t have police,” Septimus flung at her, ruddy from the sprint. “It’s got us. We’re from the Division – what’s the problem?”

Miss Fitzdegu stiffened to a glare. “Oh. Well. Sit down, Papaji, I’ll show them – it’s just Mrs. Ballestas’s women – but if you two can get rid of it, at least – ”

The father slumped gasping into his waiting-room chair, and then Miss Fitzdegu was urging us through a crape-covered door. This was a morgue, the very thing the Division hadn’t yet managed. Stark white at the walls, crisp and chemical at the nose, with empty niches presumably awaiting cadavers, and a marble-topped table splayed at its centre, and –

And, balanced precariously in the middle of the table, a severed head.

The head.

Precisely as preserved as it had been in the pirate-chest.

“Figs!”

Septimus whirled about, grabbed Miss Fitzdegu by the shoulders. “Entrances in and out of here – how many?”

“I – ah – just one – but we haven’t seen anything. We were both out the back this morning – we could hardly leave the coffins to be ruined by the rain – ”

“That’ll be it.” It took a visible jolt, but Septimus notched her voice down, prised her hands away, flipped the notebook out of her pocket. “Miss – look – here’s the thing – that head – it’s the same head what went missing from the Division.”

Miss Fitzdegu flushed. “Well, we didn’t steal it from you, if that’s what you’re suggesting! And are you not going to do anything about the break-in? Some insolent stranger waltzed straight into our private establishment and left a head there – never mind whose head! They have not reserved use of our morgue! Does your useless Division have anything to say about that?”

There was actually an idea tugging at my sleeve –

“You – erm – do you not know whose head it is, miss?”

She glared at me. Genial good-humour, it seemed, was not a Fitzdegu family trait. “I don’t like the tone of this – ”

“Persimmons!” I yelled at her. Much to my dazed elation, it had precisely the desired effect: she was evidently far too bewildered to recall the rest of her reprimand. “Miss Fitzdegu! I quite don’t ask it to accuse you! It’s just – you’re an undertaker – you know about the – erm – recently deceased – ”

“I know this head is not one of ours!” she snapped incredulously. “Look at him! He’s been dead and embalmed for at least a week!”

Septimus’s voice was a mirror to my own. “Embalmed?”

Miss Fitzdegu arched an eyebrow. “Is that not obvious?”

Then she gasped – I suppose it was startling – as Septimus sprinted past, tore her hat off and scooped the head into it, tossed it to me with what must have looked like far too much practice. I grabbed my own hat, slammed it down on top of the head, until we had our evidence firmly secured between the two of them. There’d be no chancing it this time!

“Right! Miss Fitzdegu – we’ll send someone round to see about the break-in – but first – ”

Septimus flung me a scorch of a glance, and it was quite as if she’d hurled the rest of her sentence straight through my forehead. First, the head had to be returned to the Division before it disappeared again – even if it wasn’t her case, even if Cassandra made her pay for it.

“You can’t walk off with that head!” Miss Fitzdegu burst out. “Not after you lost it! You can’t be trusted with it! Just go and get us the police!”

Kumquats, but if ever a sentence were calculated to galvanise us both –

Septimus plunged for the morgue door, swept Miss Fitzdegu aside with the most decorous of shoves: a sneaky shunt of the elbow as she pocketed her notebook. Mr. Fitzdegu senior hadn’t time to look up from his chair before we ricocheted past – certainly not enough time to register the indignant spluttering of his daughter. She wouldn’t chase us, would she? Not out of the shop?

The rain struck me square through the fringe, blurred the market square to bedraggled stripy shimmers. Septimus’s voice, half a snarl, glanced over my hair – “Round the back, before she makes a scene!” – and then we were plunging through a narrow lane that skittered along the side of the building, cutting a seam in the shops, kicking the puddles to pieces. The flurry of the main street was just about visible up ahead, carriages rattling across the slim gap that marked the end of the lane, though we still had a fair amount of sprint to go before we reached it. Septimus was right to tug us onto the detour – Miss Fitzdegu’s protests were all too audible, enough to have started another sopping mob had we sprinted across the market square –

Something snagged me at the neck, lurching out from a sheltered doorway with an elbow-grip fit to shatter a teapot. I was still clutching the head; I’d quite no hands to stop it. My legs buckled, crumpled me backwards, out of the puddles and off the lane. I cried out – sweet pomegranates, of course I did! – and it skidded Septimus about, struck her face to furious horror –

“Don’t do anything rash this time, dearie,” Maggie growled past my ear. A freezing jab at my temple – cold, metallic, impossible to cringe away from with her arm around my throat. I, of all people, knew precisely what it was. “’Less you want Morfydd’s brains to fill one of those hats.”