Octavia watched as he slipped away into the crowd, but did not see him leave the room. He had a gift for stealth, she had often noticed, and seemed at times to appear and disappear at will. In the blue room, she stationed herself with some reluctance on a sofa, but abandoned it again a moment later. She paced the fringes of the room, refusing the sorbets she was repeatedly offered. She watched the clock. Ten minutes passed, then fifteen.
“Where is Lord Strythe?” she demanded, approaching a serving boy. Even as she spoke, she had hardly a notion of her own intentions, or of exactly what pretence she was adopting. “I was to be sent for at once when his plans were known.”
“If you please, miss,” he said. “I shall pass word as quick as you like, but it’s Mr. Maitland sees to the comings and goings of Her Ladyship’s guests.”
“Nonsense,” said Octavia. “You have been to and fro with your ices since I came in, and must be passing through the kitchens. You don’t mean to tell me, surely, that there is no talk below stairs of my uncle’s situation. His Lordship will expect that arrangements have been made for me. You did not think he would leave me to traipse home alone in the snow?”
The boy looked anxiously about the room. “Well, since it’s your uncle, miss, I expect there’s no harm in saying. Only you mustn’t say as it were me who told you, or Mr. Maitland will skin me. His Lordship has been called away, miss. He’d hardly got here when the word came. He’s been took below to leave by the back of the house. Her Ladyship said it must all be done without a fuss.”
“Called away by whom?” Octavia said. “My uncle is not on a casual social call.”
Again the serving boy looked about him in discomfort. “Look, miss, His Lordship was most anxious to light out directly, that’s all I can tell you. He’s most likely waiting for you now, since his carriage couldn’t hardly have been took in to the stables. Shall I send word that I’ve found you, miss?”
“No,” said Octavia at once. “No, it is very good of you, but I must get along. I should be obliged if you would show me the way, but without a fuss, just as you say. We must do nothing to add to Lady Ashenden’s embarrassment.”
She moved quickly below stairs, meeting no one’s eyes until she came to the draughty passageway that gave on to the stable yard, where a flask was being passed around while a footman gave a bawdy account of an incident in a fortune teller’s tent.
The servants fell silent at her approach. “Oh, good heavens,” she cried, with slightly more theatrical emphasis than was needed. “Oh, I pray I am not too late. Where is Lord Strythe? I must see him before he leaves.”
The groom who had the flask held it half-hidden in his cupped hand, uncertain whether deference was required. The footman appraised her for a moment before he spoke. “Steady on, miss,” he said. “There’s a fuss. His Lordship mustn’t be detained. He’s been called away on—”
“On urgent business. Yes, yes, I know all that, but there is—” She cast about for a moment in desperation. “There are donations, you see, that must be lodged to the account of the foundation. The gentleman from Coutts is on hand, but nothing can be done until His Lordship has signed the instrument. Quickly now, where is his carriage?”
“Which it just this minute turned into the lane from the stables. I am sorry for it, miss, but you will not catch him now unless it is by pelting after him as you are.”
“Then that is what I must do,” said Octavia, pushing past him. The lane outside was almost in darkness, but at its end the lights of Piccadilly could be seen, and against them the silhouette of the carriage as it laboured over the poor cobbles. On her bicycle she might easily have caught it up, but she had hidden it near the gates of Green Park, and even at a run she could not hope to close the distance now on foot. The carriage had gone some two hundred yards already, and when it reached the better paving of Piccadilly, the horses would be brought to a trot. She was too late.
“Miss,” the footman called to her from the doorway behind her. “It’s a dog of a night, miss. One of the lads will run out for a cab so as you can follow after him. Come along in, miss, or you’ll catch your death.”
And then it came.
Distantly, she felt herself lurch, and knew that she had grasped a railing. The vision was fragmented and indistinct, as if a magic lantern were playing upon rags of muslin. She saw a dark interior, some unknown room. Two figures were in shadow, upright or crouched, but intent, always, on the one who lay between them. She was pale and still, and illuminated faintly, as if by moonlight.
That was all, there was never more. It was almost nothing, like the vestige of some long-ago dream, but it left her weak and shaken always, as if she had witnessed some unspeakable thing and stood by in helplessness.
She clung to the railing as it passed, putting a hand to her chest to soothe her breathing. It was a trick of the imagination, nothing more, brought on by a lack of rest. She ought to seek out a tonic of some kind. She heard the servants calling, and their footsteps as they approached. She ignored them, turning her attention again to Lord Strythe’s carriage, which had halted now just short of the corner. A gauze of fog and thin snow settled and shifted, making the shapes of things greyish and uncertain. For a moment she saw nothing, then a figure resolved itself. A man had come forward from the shadows, his movements fluid and assured, and when he reached the roadside he did not trouble himself to flag the carriage down. He made himself seen, then simply waited.
The door of the carriage was flung out and a step briskly lowered. The man on the footway approached then paused, seeming to confront the occupant before slowly shaking his head. He looked up finally, as if searching the heavens, but perhaps it was only that he had noticed the gathering snow. He climbed inside, rapping on the frame before pulling the door closed behind him. At this the carriage drew sharply away, turning into Piccadilly in a swirl of mist and horse breath, and in moments even the clatter of wheels and hooves could no longer be heard.
IV
THE SNOW HAD died away in the night. Where it had lain on the ground, it survived only in smutted brackets, and in the roads the tainted slush was churned under wheels to a running filth. It was early still, not yet fully light, but Soho was thronged with men and women of all walks, with omnibuses and carriers’ carts and the dozens of horses that drew them. Gideon lurched among them in a sickly stupor, veering aside at intervals to support himself against a wall or a lamp post, or to bring up a thin but scalding vomit. He could taste it still, the resinous sweetness that had darkened his senses. It was on his breath, and in his sodden lungs. He felt it when he moved his head, encumbering his wits and shrouding his very spirit.
Miss Tatton was gone. Of that much he was certain. He had known it somehow while he still slept, feeling her absence even before the cold. His first thought, when the sexton roused him, had been to look for her. He had writhed free as he was dragged to his feet, had scrabbled at the cold stone, only half seeing, for some trace of her, some sign that she had been real.
He found the damp and filthy rag first, and near it a small thing that he might have overlooked if he had not felt its buckled edge under his palm. A keepsake. She had kept it, after all. He closed his fingers about it as he was hauled again to his feet, and could do no more before he was marched from the altar, his shoulders gripped by a pair of tobacco-stained talons.