“Who, Angie?” He cast a look about the darkened church, recalling with a lurch of dread that he had not closed the door behind him. “Who took him? Is someone coming back for you? Someone who means you harm?”
“We must keep it hidden, your uncle said. Keep the brightness hidden. But we couldn’t, in the end. I’ll be all brightness soon, that’s what they said, and ain’t that a special thing? I should be happy. But it was black, the air. Like something made of nothing. I can taste it still. I can feel it.”
“Angie,” he said, clutching her shoulders. “Miss Tatton, listen to me. Someone has poisoned you, I think, and you are delirious. I will go for help. I will fetch a doctor here, even if I must pick someone’s pocket to pay him. I will come back soon, do you hear? I will come back to you, I promise.”
He put a hand to her face, forgetting himself in the tumult of his feelings. Her skin was cold, but dewed as if by a fever. He stroked her cheek, freeing a slip of hair that had clung to it, and with trembling effort Angie covered his fingers with her own. He brought his face very near to hers.
“Too shy, always,” she said. “Too shy for your own good. You have to go now, young master. They’ll be here soon, and they’ll find you too. It’s too late for me now, I can feel it. You have to go.”
“Angie, no. Never say that. I shall call the police. I shall fetch a doctor and he will—and you will be—”
He broke off, a sob rising in him, as Angie’s fingers curled feebly about his neck, drawing him to her. They were frigid still, but her lips, as they parted under his, were warm and living.
“See?” she said, releasing him. “Other things. You were put here for other things. Now go.”
He drew away, dazed from her, and so lost in her face that for a moment he suspected nothing. But she was staring past him, her scream a hoarse rasp as the rag was clamped to his mouth. He was slowing then, even as he began to struggle, clawing emptiness and breathing only the strange deep sweetness now, remembering nothing else. He saw her once more, as he was hauled up, the sense almost gone from things. He saw it, or thought he did. The brightness of her.
The brightness of her, and then the dark.
II
WHEN HER KNOCKING brought no one to the door, Octavia Hillingdon was not unduly perturbed. No doubt she would have been refused admission in any event, and she had been quite prepared for this contingency. Her plan was a simple one, but it required that she settle upon some distinguishing feature among the uppermost parts of the building. Descending the steps, she retrieved her bicycle and crossed the street, conducting it alongside her as she set off once more in the direction of St. James’s Palace.
She scanned the roofline opposite as she did so, and was so much absorbed in this that she very nearly collided with a news vendor, a weathered and black-shawled woman of above sixty who berated her and her “contraption” in the coarsest terms.
Octavia begged her pardon, though she did so with a certain briskness. The woman presented a formidable obstacle and had hardly been disturbed. “News and Post a ha’penny!” she bawled, holding that evening’s edition stoutly aloft. “Ha’penny the News and Post!”
“What have you on the front page?” Octavia inquired. Among those belonging to the better papers, the Evening News and Post was regarded with a degree of disdain, but she maintained a certain professional curiosity. “May I look? Has another vagrant been found who resembles a long-lost duke?”
The woman backed away, folding the newspaper primly at her side. “I only hump them out here and flog them, miss,” she said. “I don’t get them off by heart first. Pay your ha’penny, and you can look all you like.”
“I am on my way to an engagement and cannot carry a newspaper,” said Octavia. “I will give you a farthing for a look at the front page. Come, the night is cold. It is coming on to snow, and you have half a dozen copies yet to sell at this hour.”
“Ha’penny,” said the woman, gathering herself resolutely beneath her dark rags. “I should be asking for more, by rights, the fright you gave me. I still ain’t over the shock of it.”
Octavia could not help but laugh. “Very well, then, a ha’penny it is. And when I have looked over the front page you may have it back to sell again for your trouble. Does that seem fair?”
The woman regarded her grudgingly still, but handed over the paper, drawing a fresh copy from a broad satchel and resuming her cries. Octavia scanned the front page with a practised eye, passing over the death notices and the claims that were made for sauces and corn cures.
“‘Spiriters feared abroad once more,’” she read aloud, having settled on a headline. “What is this now?”
“Them Spiriters,” the woman said. “Been at it again, they’re saying.”
For a moment Octavia’s vision dimmed. She grasped the frame of her bicycle and pressed her eyes shut. Not now.
But there was nothing more. She blinked and drew in a careful breath. “Yes, but who are they?” she continued. “What exactly have they been at? ‘A pall of fear has once again fallen over Whitechapel and surrounding districts, occasioned by the recent disappearance of another young girl. Talk has again turned to the shadowy malefactors known only as the Spiriters.’ ‘Shadowy malefactors,’ indeed. It is like something from a bad novel.”
“Name and address is up at the top, miss, for them as wants to write a letter in. I’ll be sure to tell them to expect it.”
Octavia laughed again and took up her bicycle. “Quite right,” she said, folding the newspaper and returning it. “You are a working woman, and I have detained you long enough. Goodnight to you, madam.”
She turned into Cleveland Row, quickening her pace against the cold, and came after a little way to a narrow back street that gave on to an irregular and gloomy court. To the rear of the grand establishments of St. James’s Street she would find their kitchens and coach houses, and it was by this route, she supposed, that servants and tradesmen reached them. Crossing again to the far side of the lane, she searched the upper reaches of houses, fixing once more upon the high chimney stack of gaunt sandstone she had observed from St. James’s Street. She cast a last look about her, then unlatched a narrow gate and proceeded at a breezy pace towards the kitchen door.
Beyond it was a dingy passageway lined with milk cans and coal scuttles. A porter hoisted up his bucket of potato peelings to let her pass, but his expression was dimly perturbed.
“I shall be leaving my bicycle in the passageway,” she told him brightly. “One hears of so many thefts nowadays. I do hope it won’t be an inconvenience.”
She passed from the cellars and storerooms to the busier regions surrounding the kitchens themselves, drawing increasing scrutiny as she did so, and as she reached the foot of the servants’ stairs, she was accosted at last by an agitated young man who wore a morning suit beneath his immaculate apron. She bid him a crisp good evening and moved to pass by him, but he raised his gleaming salver to block her way.
“Pardon me, miss,” he said. “You are in the wrong place.”
“Indeed I am,” Octavia replied. “I am at the bottom of this staircase, and I should like to be at the top. Would you be so good as to let me pass?”