On their return from the afternoon with Hodge in which they’d discovered the Alp’s abandoned quarters, they found Cook complaining about the untidy state of her kitchen. A series of deliveries had all arrived at the same time, and her large scrubbed tabletop was invisible under all manner of sacks and brown-paper-wrapped parcels.
“Right,” she said as soon as they entered the kitchen. “It’s no use making those big hungry eyes at me, Charlie Pyefinch. There’ll be no tea until this is packed away, and I have business at Goodbehere’s, so I suggest you all fill the storerooms with this mess, and then when I return I shall no doubt be in a better frame of mind and attempt some pikelets or suchlike.”
Lucy’s sharp eyes had spotted pastry sitting beneath a damp towel on the sideboard, so she knew Cook was not really in the foul and thunderous temper she was affecting.
The Smith came in with a large dripping basket of eels while they were putting things away.
Cait caught him at the door appearing, as was her wont, from nowhere.
“Ah, see, I wouldn’t be dribbling that wet creel into the lady’s kitchen right now if I was you,” she said. “She’s a bit on the sensitive side today. I’ve been hiding from her all afternoon.”
“Right. Thank you for the warning,” he said, turning round. “Back pantry it is.”
Lucy was already in the back pantry, putting a coarse sack of potatoes away. The dirt on the vegetables had seeped through the sack and her gloves were muddy as a result. So she’d gone to the sink and begun to wash them with a new bar of Caverhill’s Patent Pine Tar soap. She washed the gloves on her hands, just as if washing the hands themselves, and as she did so inhaled the piny tang of the suds and somehow the smell and the coarse sacking filled one of the holes in her memories, and she found she was gripping the side of the sink very tightly so as not to fall over at the nastiness of it.
It was at that moment The Smith entered with his basket of eels. He put it on the ground over a drain grate, and then saw her face.
“What?” said The Smith.
“A memory,” she said. “It. I…”
“You glinted something?” he said. Then looked at her gloved hands. “But how—?”
“No,” she said.
She had to sit down; she moved a box off a barrel and lowered herself onto it. The Smith gave her a peculiar look, and then walked out of the door. She heard the screech and whoosh of the pump-handle, and then he returned with Cait and a cup full of cold water. She took a few sips and nodded. He leant back on the shelves and raised a shaggy eyebrow.
“I just remembered things I didn’t know I’d forgotten,” she said. She pointed at the hessian sack, then at the soap.
“It was the smell,” she said. “This piny, tarry smell. And then the sacking. It just made me remember something…”
“Nothing good,” Cait said. “Not from the way you reacted. You’re white as a sheet.”
She nodded.
“Tell me,” said The Smith.
“Arrah now, come sit by the range and get your colour back first,” said Cait. She put her arm round Lucy’s shoulder and led her gently back into the kitchen proper.
Jed cocked his head at them. Charlie opened his mouth with a question that The Smith killed with one look before he could voice it.
Lucy sat at the table and sipped her water. She was conscious of them looking at her, of the heat at her back from the range, and most of all of the firm hand that the girl from Skibbereen kept companionably on her shoulder.
Clearly looks were exchanged that she wasn’t privy to, because Charlie suddenly got very busy clearing the rest of the provisions off the table, and Hodge decided Jed wanted to go outside to take care of some canine needs better addressed in the street than inside a kitchen.
“Go on,” said Cait. “If you’ve a mind. Better out than in.”
“I was brought to the Safe House with a plaster put over my mouth,” Lucy said. “It was a rough square of sacking like that potato sack and it smelled of pine, because of the pitch they’d used to stick it to my face.”
“Yes,” The Smith said. “Sara Falk was horrified that you’d been treated like that. Sharp too.”
“Well, I remembered that well enough,” she said, taking another sip from the tin cup. “But until I went in there…”
She nodded at the back pantry.
“I’d forgotten the people who did it to me.”
“The plaster?” he said.
She nodded.
“Was a man called Ketch,” said The Smith. “Sharp said. A sort of local drunk. Bill Ketch.”
“No,” said Lucy. “It wasn’t Ketch. It was others.”
“Others,” said The Smith, raising an eyebrow. “What kind of others?”
“Others like the ones who tried to stop us on the way here. Charlie and me. On the canal. Others with faces covered in blue lines, wearing skins and bones–I mean clothes that looked sort of normal except they’re made of hide and fur and use bits of dead things to fasten them.”
“Yes,” she said. Her heart was thudding at the memory of it. “Sluagh.”
“Bad cess to ’em,” said Cait, squeezing her shoulder encouragingly.
“Slow down,” The Smith said. “Take your time.”
She shook her head. She had to get this memory out of the way as fast as she could.
“They took me and they tied me up somewhere. I can’t remember where they took me from except I was asleep and then I wasn’t and they were carrying me away from the light into a wood. I think it was a wood: there were branches and brambles anyway. And then they held my head and they stared at me. And I tried to not look into their eyes because I knew that was what they were trying to make me do, so I concentrated on the patterns on their faces, the blue tattoos, and I just followed the lines like a maze, trying to lose myself in them and not hear what they were saying, but all the lines kept leading back to the eyes, and I think that’s when they got in my head and started shutting bits of memory away and putting other bits and pieces in there.”
She shuddered and felt sick and cold at the core of herself.
“Them going inside my mind,” she said. “I don’t know how to explain but it’s… it leaves you feeling dirty and…”
“Violated,” The Smith said gently. “It’s like rape.”
Cait stepped back and looked at him.
“Arrah now, and how would you be knowing what rape felt like, big strong man?”
Him saying the word didn’t help. Putting a name to it wasn’t the thing. Saying it made it worse. Made it public. Lucy felt sicker and more exposed.
“It’s nothing like rape,” she said. Though of course it was. “I mean, I’ve not been that unlucky, but I’ve had men try after me, bad men, and so far I’ve been faster and smarter than them.”
She remembered breaking a bottle on a man’s head by the sea in France. It wasn’t a good memory either: she could remember his hands, his breath, hot and meaty and garlicky, and she could still feel the impact in her hand and the cracking sound. She’d run so fast she never knew if it was the bottle or his skull, or both.
“And you can fight, because you’re strong,” Cait said. “And I can—”
“But against the Sluagh, opening your mind and laying your innermost self bare–there’s no power, no strength that you can use against it,” said The Smith. “It’s like they put a thing in you, a stain…”
“A blackness,” Lucy said. He nodded.
“They put a blackness inside you and your brain freezes in terror and then they can do what they like because all the rest of you can do is concentrate on that blackness and watch it, in case it moves and hurts you.”
She stared at him.
“Yes. How do you know?”
“I’ve been around a very long time, Lucy Harker,” he said. As if that answered anything at all.
And then Cook returned and the tension in the room broke as she had to be filled in, and then Charlie miraculously reappeared, having finished pretending he was stacking things in the storeroom, and Lucy was sent to get dry gloves, and then tea, jam and buttery pikelets and pipe-smoking happened, and the world looked better again.
Except clearly Lucy’s memory that the Sluagh had been involved in working on her mind had added evidently something to the equation that The Smith had been trying to solve as he tried to assess the sum of the enemies currently ranged against them. She noticed him talking quietly to Hodge and Cook when she was supposedly involved in conversation with Charlie and Cait, and when she asked again if she might to go back out with Hodge and Charlie to look more closely at the house on Golden Square, he forbad it. She had been looking forward to a break in the routine of going back to the Isle of Dogs each night and staying out with them, but she found herself back in the dog cart with The Smith, heading east as the evening lengthened.
He spoke little as they went, not even pointing useful and educative things as they passed them in the way he normally would. When they reached the house, he bade her a good night and went into the workshop.
She lay awake, thinking of the day’s doings and trying to put them together, adding the new scrap of memory to the patchwork of her past, and most of all trying to parse the sudden tension she had felt between Cait and The Smith. And then she found she was just thinking of Cait and wishing she could be more like her, more direct and calm and then she started thinking she’d like wild, unruly hair like Cait’s… and then she noticed the silence.
The Smith had stopped working in the room below.
And then she heard the ghost of a footstep on the ground outside, and perhaps because it was a footstep evidently trying not to be heard, she slipped out of bed and looked out of the window and saw The Smith walking carefully away from the house in the dark.
Of all the lessons that Lucy had enjoyed most, the ones involving tracking each other through the crowded city was her favourite. In part this was because she was so very good at it, naturally alert and gifted with the ability to go fast-yet-slow when she needed to. And she and Charlie had been told that since they were to be trained on the job, that no experience was to be wasted. Maybe this is why thirty seconds later she found herself beneath the starless sky, trailing The Smith as he picked up speed, striding across the rough ground, heading north. Or perhaps it was the unexpectedly furtive way he had left the house, carrying a bag she had never seen before. Maybe she just followed because she was inquisitive and thought if she could see where he went she might get to the bottom of why it was she was so deeply ambivalent about a man who should, by all rights, be a welcome protector.
The Smith was a very fast walker, his long strides eating up the mileage with no hint of slowing as they headed north, moving off the Isle of Dogs and following the course of the North London Railway line all the way to Bow Road, where he joined it, heading east on the high street until they crossed the turbid waters of the River Lea and doglegged north again via Pudding Mill Water, where she nearly got seen by him as she flitted over the mill race by the looming new flour works. Luckily she found a scrap of shadow in time as his head turned to look back at the city he was now leaving behind as he struck out across the wilds of Hackney Marsh itself. From then on it was more a matter of guessing where he was going and zigzagging an intersecting course, keeping to the cover of the scant hedges vegetation lining the drainage cuts as he made his way in a more easterly direction, until he crossed the last major water by a thin, single-plank footbridge and strode up and over the railbed of the Cambridge Line, his feet crunching the clinker as he went.
Lucy followed on his tail, making sure she kept low and only trod on the wooden ties as she crossed the iron tracks. And then, three and a half miles and less than an hour after they had left The Folley, he came to a halt at a crossroads on Ruckholt Lane. On the south side was a farm, on the east the silhouette of a grand mansion behind a wall spiked with railings. To the west stretched the flat water of the new reservoirs for the East London Waterworks, dull silver planes looking blankly up at the night sky above.
The Smith turned towards the copse of trees on the north quarter of the junction. Lucy was in a ditch to his west. And for a long time they stayed like that. Then The Smith walked forward and hung the bag on a gnarled tree, and stepped back, staring into the shadows.
“Take it,” he said.
This far from the city his voice, though quiet, reached her ears quite clearly. And for a while it seemed only her ears. And then there was a barely discernible rustle in the shadows beneath the trees, and a hoarse voice replied.
“Smith.”
The shadow resolved into a man with hair plaited into long pigtails that hung from beneath an ancient fore-and-aft hat decorated with limpet shells. His clothes were patched from rabbit fur and pinned in place with bones instead of buttons. And his face, as Lucy had somehow dreaded it might be, was scarified with a maze of dark ink. She dipped her head lower behind the band of dock leaves, sure the Sluagh’s eyes were sharper in the dark than The Smith’s. But what disturbed her more than the Sluagh was The Smith’s ease with it.
“How did you know we are here?” said Fore-and-Aft.
“There’s just one of you, so don’t be playing games with me,” said The Smith easily. “And I’ll be straight enough with you.”
“But how did you know one of us would be here?” said Fore-and-Aft. “For you wouldn’t have seen me if I hadn’t moved.”
“Last crossroads before running water and the iron railway on the edge of the city?” said The Smith. “One of you would always be here.”
“What’s in the bag?” said Fore-and-Aft.
“A question,” said The Smith. “Open it.”
The Sluagh took the bag, shook it and opened the drawstring. He reached a hand in and took out a small scrabble of something Lucy couldn’t make out.
“Bones?” said Fore-and-Aft.
“A bone pet. Sent to my cells. To kill one of your own,” said The Smith.
“Ah,” said the Sluagh. “That bone pet.”
He drew himself to full height and tossed the bag back to The Smith.
“No interest to me. Its job is done, and it would have been tied to the man who made it.”
“Who was working for a man called Mountfellon,” said The Smith. “Why?”
“I know nothing that might help you,” said the Sluagh.
“Why did you work on the minds of a girl and the man Ketch to insert her into our midst?” said The Smith. “Why are you allied with this Mountfellon?”
“We ally with no one,” said the Sluagh, turning away.
“By Law and Lore I command you to answer!” snapped The Smith.
The Sluagh rounded on him, entirely uncowed by his tone. His lip curled in a sneer.
“Law and Lore? You, the great traitor, dare invoke Law and Lore? Law and Lore exist to stop two worlds from colliding. I know the words you use. It is not just you who study us. You look into the shadows but we look back at you,” he spat. “You say there is a natural world and another one alongside it, a world you call supranatural. Well, we call it the old world, the Pure World. We call the other new and unnatural one the Hungry World.”
“The Hungry World?” said The Smith. “What does that nonsense mean?”
Fore-and-Aft grunted in contempt as he began to stride back and forth in front of The Smith, becoming increasingly agitated as the words began to pour out of him in a dam-burst of pent-up anger.
“And is your new world not a hungry one, Smith? Does it not take our forests to build ships so that that can go beyond the great salt waters and bring back more things to sate that endless hunger? Are our trees not taken to make pit props for the holes you dig, grubbing out the coal you need for your smoke-belching machine-farms? Do you not take our very darkness with your gas lamps, the deep darkness we need as much as you need sunlight? And what of our great silences? The places where the only sound was the wind passing over the land and the cry of the birds? You have put your clanking steam machines with their whistles and their damned iron rails through our wastelands. You breed like rabbits in a landscape without foxes. Every month there are more of you. Every year’s end there is less room for us than there was at the beginning. The new world is insatiable and you, the mighty Oversight, are partial and blinkered and hostile to us, to the old world. You turn a blind eye to the harm done to us by the new world, by the Hungry World. You were charged to patrol the borders between both. You do not. You look one way, you push one way, your hand is not even, your ‘justice’ is not fair. You have all lived so long within the Hungry World you have forgotten you have our blood as well as theirs! And when we defend ourselves, because you do not, we are punished and hounded and hurt. We are an affront to you, not because we are monsters, but because your own betrayal of Law and Lore is the true monstrosity, and we are but the living remnants who remind you of your failure and your perfidy, the mirror in which you see yourselves as you really are: lackeys and lickspittles of the Hungry World.”
The Smith had stood his ground in front of the tirade, like an oak tree facing down a gale, but now he took a step forward.
“Be very careful who you call lickspittle, Nightganger, for my hammer might remember the taste of Sluagh blood and get hungry again.”
They stared each other down. Then The Smith relaxed, dismissing his moment of threat in a chuckle.
“Forgive me. I came for information. Not a lecture on your grievances.”
“These are not grievances, Smith. These are atrocities,” said Fore-and-Aft. “There is an old way that our people have travelled for twice a thousand years or more, between Wenlock Edge and Grimsby. And the hungry men have pinned iron rails across it, rails that go from London to Manchester and have no break in them. And now the old way cannot be used by us, or such as us, who cannot cross cold iron. Did The Oversight stop the rails? Did you enforce Law and Lore and stop them destroying our ancient landscape? No. You looked the other way. This web of iron is a cage. To pass over the land in our troops is a part of who we have always been, but now we wake up each morning to find another swathe of countryside is barred to us, or only accessible if we take a crazed meandering route that switches back and forth like a madman trying to escape a maze. You are mongrels. You have Pure blood mixed with that of the Hungry World, but I think you hate the Pure in you. I think that is why you betray us at every turn, ignoring our interests and letting the Hungry World eat at us like a wasting disease. You want us to die. You want us to leave, because the Hungry World is too greedy to share. It is a void that must fill itself at anyone’s cost but its own.”
“What do you want?” said The Smith.
“Law and Lore. Fairly applied. No more. No less.”
“And what does that have to do with Mountfellon?” said The Smith sharply. “Is this avalanche of resentment what is behind your new loyalty to him?”
Fore-and-Aft shook his head, almost sadly.
“Who are you to speak of loyalty to us? You of all the people who walk beneath the sky? How can you hope to change your destiny, turncoat,” he sneered. “The mighty Smith who will always betray all you love, as you always have, when the darkness comes back in you.”
The Smith’s hands flexed, as if he wished he had his hammer to hand.
“Once I believed that,” he said, voice rough and low.
“Once?” said the Sluagh.
“Once, yes,” said The Smith. “But then I remembered I was a maker. I can turn a horseshoe into a knife or a sword into a ploughshare and back again. I can make or remake anything. Including my fate.”
The Sluagh shook his head.
“My father’s fathers were right. You have run mad with arrogance.”
“Your father’s fathers feared the darkness so they made themselves its pets. I went into the darkness. I looked it in the eye. And then I came back. Your father’s fathers knew nothing…” said The Smith.
The Sluagh smiled nastily and leant in and whispered so that Lucy could only just make out what he said:
“The others, The Oversight, do they ever know–ever guess–what you were? What your true allegiance is? Do you even know?”
“They know who I am. They know I am true. And not even you can guess at my allegiance,” said The Smith.
“None come back from beyond the dark mirror unless the powers that rule there allow it,” said Fore-and-Aft.
“How would you know?”
The Sluagh waved a hand at the darkness of the night above.
“I am sworn to the night. I know its mysteries.”
The Smith laughed, a deep-throated rumble of true mirth.
“The night? The night is nothing compared to the void beyond the mirrors. If dark was light then the darkness beyond is strong as a thousand suns, and the night you say you understand is no more than the sputtering flame on a ha’penny dip.”
He picked up the bag of bones and emptied them onto the road. Then he trod on them, ground them to splinters and kicked the debris towards the Sluagh.
“Tell your chieftains. If you continue to work against me, this will be your fate. Ground to flinders and dust and lost in the night breeze. And if I hear of any of you working for Mountfellon or that damned lawyer Templebane we will come against you all with the full force of Lore and Law.”
He turned on his heel and strode south.
“Smith,” called the Sluagh. “One thing: the Black Knife.”
The Smith stopped despite himself, and turned.
“Do you still have it?”
The Smith did not answer. The Sluagh laughed mirthlessly and nodded his head.
“Then I think we all know where your allegiance lies.”
And he stepped back into the shadows and was gone. The Smith stared after him for a long time, so long that Lucy got cramp in her leg from not moving as she watched. And then he turned his back on the outer darkness and headed back for the scattered lights of the city beyond the marsh.
Lucy bit down on her lip to ride the cramp and keep herself still as she tried to both understand what she’d just heard, and work out what had not been quite right about it. Because it had not cleared up her mistrust of The Smith at all. In fact, it had posed more questions than she had set out in the night to answer.
As she waited for him to get far enough away before she risked moving to rub and stretch out the cramp, she wished she was going to return to the Safe House and not The Folley on the lonely Isle of Dogs. With Charlie and Cook and even–maybe especially–Cait she felt more secure. With The Smith and his solitary house, she felt too vulnerable and strange.
The Safe House was like a hidden castle within the city, a stronghold that could never fall.