Seventeen

But most—through the midnight streets,

I hear how the youthful harlot’s curse

Blasts the newborn infant’s ear.

And blights with plague the marriage hearse.

–William Blake, “London”

That evening, Pym made it abundantly clear that he did not care for the idea of Mrs. Fulton being squired about in Lady Camden’s absence. Disapproval was writ on every line of his dignified mien as he conducted Ryder into the Camden House salon.

Annis was ready and waiting, dressed in white muslin. She had rearranged her curls to hide the bruise on her temple from Mrs. Barlow’s blow. She had also bewitched her hair almost back to its natural color by washing it in vinegar and lye, followed by a restorative pack of hot honey. And no doubt the chambermaid who fetched these ingredients thought Mrs. Fulton’s cosmetic concoctions were as odd as her medicinal ones.

Ryder, bowing over her hand, could not resist satire upon the subject of her appearance. “White becomes you, ma’am. You look a veritable angel of mercy.”

“You are too kind, sir,” Annis said wryly, for she had dreamed of him in the few hours of sleep she had gotten—and those dreams had been far from angelic. They had been hot, wanton, shameful, yearning.

He had come for her in the same serviceable carriage he had used the night before—the perfect vehicle for tonight’s mission. It was sturdy, of common design, and did not bear its owner’s crest. There would be hundreds like it on the streets tonight.

Once they were underway, Ryder gave her a searching look. “You know that Topping Road is in the very heart of St. Giles?”

Annis nodded. She had heard of the infamous St. Giles rookery where the denizens of the London underworld and the poorest of the poor made their homes. “Shall we be in much peril, do you think?”

Ryder did not answer directly but instead drew a pistol from under the seat. “I go armed tonight, and my coachman also.”

“Your coachman,” she said with a guilty start. “I bring him into danger as well.”

“Never fear,” he said with a faint grin. “Sloane was my sergeant in the war. He says that since we left the cavalry, it has been a dull thing to be in my employ—until I met you.”

Their coach clattered onward toward the mean streets of St. Giles. Gradually, the buildings became more dilapidated. Labyrinthine side-alleys led into backstreet stews. Raggedly clothed slum dwellers warmed themselves in fires lit in iron-clad ash pails, for summer was late in coming this year.

Penny-a-cup gin mills abounded, for it was said that gin was mother’s milk to St. Giles folk. And now Annis comprehended how tragically true this was. She watched, heartsick, as a woman sat on a barrel drinking her gin while giving suck on the open thoroughfare to an infant wrapped in tatters. Another St. Giles Madonna dipped knotted rags into her cup and gave them to her pinch-faced children, who gnawed at them hungrily.

Ryder leaned toward her in the dark of the carriage. “We’ve turned onto Topping Road. You must look sharply for your Meg now.”

Annis saw that Topping Road must be a customary hunting ground for prostitutes, for the streets were full of men in carriages trolling for young girls. Desperately Annis searched for sight of Meg among the swarming faces and bodies willing to do anything for the price of a shilling or a cup of gin. But though they traveled Topping Road from one end to the other and beheld all its sorrow and depravity in full measure, there was no sign of Meg.

Annis was in despair. “I was certain she would be here. Could we not turn around and make another attempt?”

Ryder nodded and tapped a signal on the ceiling with his cane. The carriage swerved around a corner as Sloane began to work the team back to the beginning of their route.

Annis leaned across the seat toward Ryder, and the question was out of her mouth before ever she thought. “Have you ever come here and...” she trailed off, realizing that she probably didn’t want to know the answer.

He frowned, knowing exactly what she meant. “Do you think my taste runs to these little street sparrows? Should you not know by now what it is I want?”

Retiring in flushed disarray to her side of the carriage seat, Annis renewed her vigil as they made another pass down Topping Road. Ryder sat impassively beside her with the cultivated calm of a soldier who had spent many a night facing death on the morrow.

Annis glanced at him from time to time out of the corner of her eye, knowing him to be brave and resourceful, but not really caring of how it all came out. He had never been pressed down and abused the way she had been once, the way that Meg was now. Rescuing a guttersnipe from the gutter was no quest to intrigue a lord of war.

On their third pass, by the luckiest of chances, Annis saw her. She stood beneath a swinging doorway lantern, her fair hair glowing like an angel fallen into hell as the denizens of St. Giles swarmed about her.

Ryder saw her, too, and rapped his cane on the carriage roof, a signal to his coachman. But by the time the vehicle drew over, Meg was some distance away.

“I’ll get out and fetch her,” Ryder decided. “I’ll pay her first, so she’ll come willingly.”

“No, wait.” Annis grasped his hand in sudden apprehension. There were so many menacing figures on the street. Why should they not fall upon this one lone gentleman who came so foolishly among them? “Could you not take over the team and have your coachmen fetch her instead?”

“What?” he questioned her quietly. “Send out my man because I was afraid to go myself? I think not.”

He shook his head. “The real danger out there is the mob. If the crowd becomes roused against me, one pistol won’t save me. But enough hand-wringing. I’ll be back with your strayed lambkin before you know it.”

He stepped out of the coach and sauntered off at such a leisurely pace that Annis was certain he was dawdling along just to torment her. But finally, after several eternities and a detour around a fallen drunkard, he reached Meg, conversed with her briefly, and gave her some coins. She tucked them into her bodice and followed obediently.

They were within a dozen feet of the carriage when a man—a huge giant of a man armed with a quarterstaff—stepped out of a doorway to confront them. Ryder was a man who could go many a day without encountering a man bigger than himself. But he had found one tonight on Topping Road.

Annis’s heart rose up in her throat. She knew instinctively that this giant was Belle Barlow’s creature, just as the capering dwarf was her creature.

Yet the giant seemed peaceable enough. He pulled his forelock to Ryder and then spoke to Meg. The girl handed him her coins, for the giant was apparently charged with collecting the proceeds from Mrs. Barlow’s streetwalkers.

He must also be charged with guarding them, Annis realized with breathless alarm. The quarterstaff he carried was the perfect implement for tripping up decamping carriage teams or bashing through coach windows to clout anyone who tried to harm one of the girls.

By now, Ryder had got Meg to the coach and was opening the door for her. It was then that things began to go awry.

Meg took one look at Annis and let out an earsplitting screech of “Simpkin! Help!”

He shoved the shrieking girl into the coach a fraction of a second before a gargantuan hand clamped on his shoulder and spun him away from the coach door.

Simpkin peered into the darkened coach. “What yar doing to the girlie in there?”

Ryder attacked him from behind with a two-handed chop to the back of the neck. Regrettably, the blow came nowhere close to felling this St. Giles Goliath. It merely caused him to turn around and blink rapidly as if an annoying insect were buzzing around his head. A second later, his eyes were back in focus, and he still stood between Ryder and the open coach door.

And what, thought Ryder with a sudden stab of fear, if he should ram that quarterstaff into the coach and bash Annis’s brains out?

Fortunately, the giant seemed to have forgotten about whatever was going on in the coach. An expression of rage contorted his Brobdingnagian features, and with a furious bellow, he charged forward, his quarterstaff extended before him at the height of Ryder’s groin.

Ryder backpedaled, knowing the giant meant to unman him, for that was the way they fought in St. Giles. And the quarterstaff would give the lumbering Simpkin a quickness and a reach he would not otherwise have.

Damn, but the bastard knows how to use that staff, Ryder thought grimly. Unarmed as he was, his only chance was to dance nimbly or else get his essentials crushed by the butt of Simpkin’s oak staff. But at least he had lured the giant away from the coach door. And Annis.

Another vicious thrust of the staff grazed the outside of his thigh. But once again he sidestepped just quickly enough to save the Ryder family jewels. But for how long?

My compliments, Sergeant Sloane. Ryder knew it had been no easy thing for his former sergeant to control the restive team with one hand and aim his horse pistol with the other.

Sloane’s aim was true. The giant howled and sank to his knees, his leg a welter of blood, his quarterstaff rolling on the cobbles.

Ryder dashed past his fallen adversary and swung himself into the coach...only to find that a more insidious threat had got at them from their undefended side and that Annis crouched before it, her white neck exposed to a glinting blade...

Though dimly aware that Ryder was fighting that appallingly huge man outside, Annis could do nothing for him, being engaged in wrestling Meg to the carriage floor and kneeling on her back.

Meg suddenly froze. Annis too. While Ryder and Simpkin fought on one side of the carriage, the door on the other side had been stealthily opened and taken by the enemy. Not a foot from her face stood the dwarf, Caperkin, framed in the doorway of the jerking vehicle. A dagger gleamed in his hand—though in proportion to his diminutive body, the blade looked as big as a Roman short sword.

A single motion would bring that blade across her throat before she could reach the pistol.

Fear blossomed in her heart. Yet, as she looked into the dwarf’s painted face, an unheard communication flashed between them. On deep impulse, she raised her arms and put her two wrists together, life vein to life vein, her fingers spread wide like the boughs of a tree. In the secret sign language of the Old Ones, each finger joint symbolized a different sacred tree, and all the sacred trees together made up the wildwood sanctuary.

The dwarf dropped off the carriage step. Ryder stretched out a long arm to pull the door closed, literally in the face of a new, even more dangerous peril.

The denizens of St. Giles were closing upon the coach. They had seen the Red Queen’s man shot and heard the cries of one of their own soiled doves about to be taken off against her will.

The coach plunged forward through a thudding hail of bricks and paving stones aimed at Sloane. Annis could only quail at the thought of what would happen if Sloane were to be hit and the careening horses went out of control.

But Sloane was not hit. The last missile fell harmlessly behind them, and now they were safe, rumbling away from St. Giles and all its poverty, decay, and despair.