October 9th
Choose a comely face from the thousand and address that one alone. When the lights go up and all the faces disappear, still picture that one in your mind.
The Bullet-Catcher’s Handbook
John Farthing’s appearance and disappearance had each been so unexpected that for a moment I stared along the empty corridor, doubting he’d been there at all. Then I remembered the words he’d spoken to me in Nottingham: If we meet again, it will be as enemies.
I ran.
My feet made hardly a sound on the thick carpet as I pelted back towards the stairs. Whatever Agent Farthing was doing at that moment, I needed to get away or bad things would happen.
Rushing down the marble steps that led to the entrance hall, my footsteps echoed and reverberated. People below turned to look. Immediately I slowed, only speeding up again once I’d reached the floor of the hall. My shoulders bumped one visitor after another. An African woman in a green and gold dress called out angrily. But in the midst of the crowds I was hidden to some extent.
Away behind me, almost masked by the hubbub of movement, I heard heavy footsteps advancing at speed. Jinking past a party of schoolchildren, I stepped out through the giant doorway and into the sunlight. Instead of running directly away from the building down the stairs to the plaza, I jagged left and tucked myself behind a group of Chinese tourists, who were being directed to look up at the portico above our heads.
“Note the Doric capitals,” said the tour guide, “and the false perspective given by the tapering columns.”
Two men burst from the building and were immediately searching. Advancing to the top of the steps, they looked down on the crowds arrayed below them. One raised a hand to shield his eyes as he scanned. I knew they were agents from the crisp focus of their every movement, the dour grey of their suits, and the appalling sense of authority and entitlement that they radiated.
I sidestepped behind the base of one of the giant columns and counted to ten under my breath. Then I set off directly away from where they’d been standing, hoping I’d be shielded for long enough to get away.
I chose a family group that was descending the steps and followed close behind so that it might seem I belonged. But three quarters of the way down, they stopped in their tracks to consult a map. I bumped into one of the children, stumbled and continued on my way, alone and exposed.
Then I was heading across the plaza towards the line of yellow bricks, beyond which street vendors made the crowd thicker. I glanced towards the court one final time to assure myself I was not being followed. But when I turned back I was confronted by a man of dark complexion, dressed in the same austere grey.
He spread his arms, as if to stop me trying to break past him. “Miss Barnabus,” he said. “Would you be so good as to accompany me?”
I did not try to escape. The agent stood too close for that, as he escorted me across the road and along the other side of Fleet Street. From his accent and appearance, I guessed his home to be on the Indian subcontinent. At all times he was polite and attentive – though it seemed to me his attention was readiness against the event that I should run.
From the outside, the building appeared to be like any other Georgian townhouse. That this was an illusion became apparent once we were inside and through the entrance hall. There were no pictures, no patterned wallpaper, no lampshades. Thick walls and bare corridors gave the impression of a fortress. The room into which I was pushed was unmistakably a prison cell.
There being no window, all light came from six wall-mounted lamps. The walls themselves were plain and whitewashed. The floor was tiled. The only break in this monotony was a mirror, some three feet along the base and two feet high. This had been built into the wall itself, arranged so that it left no overhang. The furniture consisted of a table, topped with silvery metal, and three white painted wooden chairs.
It was a room that offered no relief for the eye and no distraction from fear.
John Farthing may have said we would be enemies, but he had no reason in law to detain me. None that I knew. The Patent Office was bound to remain aloof from any legal case beyond its jurisdiction. He could not deliver me into the custody of the Duke of Northampton’s army. But, staring at my reflection in the mirror, I wondered if he might be so bent on my injury as to let the duke know the place and time of my release.
I worked to dismiss this thought with reason. He had no cause to be vindictive. Conflict of loyalties had riven his feelings. But it was hard to believe he would place me in active harm. I became aware that my heart was drumming and my skin had become clammy with sweat.
I chose one of the white chairs and sat, waiting for him to appear. I wondered whether he would be alone to confront me. The image of his face came to my mind, unbidden. Which, I wondered, would hurt me more – for him to shout and rage or to be questioned without emotion?
Coming upon him so unexpectedly, I’d assumed our meeting had been by chance. I’d been in the International Patent Court – a place I would expect him to frequent. But, sitting in that white cell, my racing mind seized upon another possibility. One agent had already questioned Richard da Silva about me. Farthing could have been on his way to do the same. Then a more terrifying thought struck. I’d asked for the records of my father’s trial. If that had triggered some alarm, which had called Farthing to investigate, it would have brought Richard da Silva to the attention of the Patent Office once more. And then, by implication, my dear friend Julia.
My thoughts began to tumble, uncontrolled.
I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, folded my arms on the table and rested my head on top of them. Farthing’s image was hard to banish, so I focused on my boat, the Harry, picturing it moored on the canal bank somewhere deep in the Northamptonshire countryside.
In my mind, I walked the length of the hull from prow to tiller. Then I stepped up onto the steering platform and ran my hand over the edge of the roof. Stepping down past the engine I entered the small cabin. Then, starting with the cot, I moved around the space, touching each item until I was facing the Spirit of Freedom statue. As ever, she leaned from the metal plate, powerful in her nakedness. I was reaching out to stroke her hair when a loud clunk jolted me back to the present.
I sat up in time to see the door swinging open. Two agents stepped through and took the seats on the other side of the table. One was the Indian man who’d brought me to the room. The other was a tall and pale man with high cheekbones and clear grey eyes. He might have been handsome if he’d smiled.
“Elizabeth Barnabus,” he said, speaking my name as if it were a distasteful thing.
“Your name please?” I asked.
“You’re in a lot of trouble,” he said, ignoring my question. “How much trouble is up to you. So don’t play cocky. You don’t even know how bad this is going to get. What are you doing in London?”
“Sightseeing,” I said.
The Indian agent, shorter in stature and rounder of face, was leaning back in his chair, his eyes downcast as if embarrassed to look directly at what was happening.
“What are you doing in London?” Grey Eyes asked again.
I stared right back at him and repeated my answer: “Sightseeing.”
He moved so quickly that I wasn’t prepared for the impact. One moment he was sitting, bending forwards over the table. Then his hand shot out and slapped me. He was back in his place so quickly that, but for the stinging heat in my left cheek, I would hardly have believed it had happened.
“What are you doing in London?” he asked once more, a trace of a smile on his face, as if encouraging me to try my luck.
“Would you prefer me to lie?” I asked.
This time I was braced for the slap and my head did not flick around with the impact. I kept my gaze directly on him. He drew back his hand again, but this time the other agent touched his arm. The two men put their heads close together, the Indian man whispering. Grey Eyes nodded. He got to his feet, letting the chair legs scrape over the tiles. He knocked once on the door and it was opened from outside.
“May I apologise for my colleague?” said the other, when we were alone. “He’s within his rights. But that was uncalled for, in my opinion. If you say you’re sightseeing, then I’m sure that must be part of the truth. There’s more, of course. No one does anything for just one reason. For example, from the ledger at the sign-in desk, we know that your friend was observing a case at the International Patent Court this morning. Miss Julia Swain. It would seem an impossible coincidence that you just happened to be sightseeing in the same place as her.
“Now, my colleague is of the opinion that Miss Swain should be brought in for questioning also. I imagine he would ask her if she’d seen you recently. She would naturally deny it – since you’re wanted by the law of the Kingdom… I’m sure you can imagine how he would behave.”
The impact of these words was greater than the physical assault had been. I found myself answering, though I’d intended to keep my mouth closed. “Please don’t.”
“Believe me, I don’t want her brought in. What purpose would it serve? But you must give me something or it’ll be out of my hands.”
“I did meet her.”
“And what did you talk about?”
“Her law studies. The other students. Her hopes for the future.”
“Old friends catching up? That’s nice. And what does she think of the other students?”
“She thinks they aren’t all really studying,” I said.
He chuckled. “And her?”
“She’ll confound every expectation.”
“You’re proud of her. She’s lucky to have such a loyal friend. What other friends do you have here in the capital?”
Though I understood what the two agents had been doing – one playing rough, the other gentle – the effect was hard to resist. I found myself wanting to tell this man the answers to his questions. “There are some,” I said. “But you’ll understand, I don’t want to say their names.”
“Of course,” he said. “You’re loyal. I understand. I wouldn’t expect anything less from you. But this is nothing to do with the law of the Kingdom. These friends may be harbouring you, a fugitive. But that’s nothing to do with our investigation.”
“What is your investigation?” I asked.
He spread his hands, palms raised. “Alas, I cannot tell you.”
“Then it seems you’ll have to bring your colleague back.”
“But he may hit you again.”
“I’m expecting it.” I sat back in my chair and folded my arms.
“I’m very sorry,” he said, then got up and left the room.
When Grey Eyes didn’t immediately return, I tried again to picture my boat. This time I imagined her as she had been when I first lived on her. She’d been called Bessie then. There had been two cabins and a galley, but no cargo hold. This was before she’d been disguised as a working craft. But, however hard I tried, I couldn’t bring the detail to my mind.
The lights in the room seemed brighter than ever, the whiteness of the walls giving me no relief. The mirror reflected the white of the ceiling.
I stared at it.
Some of my father’s tricks had employed half-silvered glass that would either be transparent or throw back a reflection, depending on the lighting and the angle. The thought came to me that perhaps this mirror could be a window – that an observer might be standing on the other side, watching me. I was just about to get up and investigate when the door opened again.
Grey Eyes entered and sat facing me.
“Who are your accomplices?”
I remained silent, braced ready for violence.
“Have you been in contact with any circus folk whilst in London?”
“No.”
“When did you last see the dwarf known as Fabulo?”
My mind twisted at the mention of the name. I couldn’t deny knowledge. I’d seen the court record that linked us. “Last winter,” I said.
He must have picked up my slight hesitation, because that cruel smile curled the corners of his mouth again.
“You’re lying. When did you see him?”
“Why do you want to know?”
His hand moved faster than I could react. The slap sounded loud in the bare room. The shock of the pain made me gasp.
“When did you last see the dwarf?”
“Last winter.”
The second slap hit me further back on the side of my face, leaving a high-pitched whistle in my ear. I looked past my interrogator to the mirror and found myself imagining a man standing in darkness behind the glass.
“Tell me the truth!”
“Hit me again,” I said.
He did. And I welcomed the sting of it. We were performers. I understood that now. And with this knowledge, I could take the punishment he was going to give.
“When did you see the dwarf?”
“I’ve told you already.”
“Then tell me about the locksmith Jeremiah Cavendish. When did you last see him?”
I hadn’t been prepared for the change of question. The surprise must have shown on my face. The uncertainty.
“I don’t know anything,” I said.
Grey Eyes swung his arm. I watched it coming, registering too late that it was a fist, not the flat of his hand. The blow connected with the side of my head. I saw lights flashing. I didn’t even know that I was falling until my shoulder hit the tiles.
He was on his feet and around the table. I saw his mouth moving, but could hear nothing beyond the steamsaw cutting wood inside my head. His mouth moved again. He clenched his fist and drew it back, but something stopped him.
He turned to look back over his shoulder, though there was no one else in the room. He straightened himself. He looked directly at the mirror. There was a pause. Then he marched away.
At first, I couldn’t get up. I lay on my side, concentrating on breathing in and out. As my hearing began to return, I clambered onto hands and knees, and then to my feet. I swayed, staring at the mirror, as Grey Eyes had done.
I sensed the presence of someone watching. I lurched towards it. There was a sound behind the wall – the opening of a door. I put my face close to the glass and cupped my hands to blank out the light. And there it was – ghostly on the other side, a hidden room, small, blank and dark, but for the crack of light streaming in through a door that was slowly swinging closed.
The attic room smelled of roasted meat and garlic. As I crawled through the hole in the end wall, Ellie, Jeremiah and Fabulo looked up from their meal of sausages wrapped in slices of bread.
“What happened to your face?”
The question had been voiced by Ellie, but they were all asking it with their eyes. I hadn’t yet seen myself in a mirror, but I’d known it must be bad from the look on the face of the agent who’d come to escort me from the cell.
“Would you believe I walked into a lamp post?”
“Who did it?” demanded Fabulo.
I told them, in a roundabout way, omitting my visit to Julia and Richard da Silva. Stepping into the Patent Court would have seemed like reckless stupidity to Fabulo. I couldn’t explain my reason for taking the risk without admitting I hadn’t trusted him. So I said I’d been walking along Cable Street when John Farthing spotted me.
“He must have been searching for you!”
“No,” I said. “He was as surprised as I.”
“Look what he did to your beautiful mouth,” said Ellie, dabbing a wet cloth against my swollen lip. Each time she dipped it in the bucket, I saw threads of my blood spreading through the water.
“That Farthing’s a bastard like the rest of them!” said Fabulo.
“What did you tell him?” asked Jeremiah.
Ellie rounded on him. “She wouldn’t say nothing! Just look at her face.”
“Then why did they let her go?”
“’Coz she wouldn’t talk!”
“If she hadn’t talked, she’d still be there!”
“No, she wouldn’t!”
“That’s enough,” snapped Fabulo. “Tell them, Elizabeth.”
“I didn’t give them anything! But they gave me something – though they didn’t mean to. They asked about you, Fabulo. Wanted to know when I’d seen you last.”
“What stupid thing have you gone and done, little man?” growled Jeremiah.
“I’ve done nothing!”
“You must have. The Patent Office are after you!”
“I have not!”
“That wasn’t all,” I cut in, before their tempers could heat up further. “You should let me finish. They also wanted to know about a man called Jeremiah Cavendish. That is you, I suppose?”
The locksmith sat down on the tea chest with a bump.
“But you’re right in what you said. If they’d been after me, I’d still be locked in that cell. They grabbed me because they have court records connecting me to Fabulo. But what do they know that connects Fabulo to Jeremiah?”
“Nothing.”
There was a silence. Then the locksmith cleared his throat. “There is something,” he said. “When you took me to see Harry Timpson in prison, there was a register. We had to give our names. It was a Kingdom prison. But Timpson’s case was mixed up with the Patent Office. We were both on that visitor list together.”
Fabulo put aside his bread and sausage, as if it had lost its flavour. “Connection or no, why are the bastards after finding us?”
I looked to Jeremiah, who was staring fixedly at a weevil crawling across the floorboards between his boots.
“I think you’d better explain about your duties to the Guild of Locksmiths,” I said.
A deep frown was growing on Fabulo’s forehead. “What has he gone and done?”
“It’s more what he hasn’t done. He can’t face his old colleagues. He’s dropped out of circulation. I think perhaps they’ve noticed.”
Ellie had finished tending my face. She dropped the cloth into the bucket and sat back on her heels. “Why would they be bothered that he’s missing?”
“Jeremiah,” I said. “How many people know what you know about the locks of the International Patent Court? “
He looked up and met my eye. “Five,” he said. “Including me.”
Fabulo groaned. “That looks like a good enough reason.”