Shanghai Sparrow (20 page)

“Goodbye, Charlotte.” She wanted to say something else, wanted to say she was sorry, but
sorry
wasn’t a big enough word.
Sorry
was a feather drifting on the wind.

She turned away and began to walk, finding herself eventually back at the road, or anyway at some road. She hardly cared if someone found her, but though the occasional carriage passed, no-one stopped. At some point she remembered she had the crystal in her hand. She dropped it indifferently in the mud.

And she walked, and kept walking.

S
O SHE HAD
walked, and she had begged and been chased off and slept in ditches and dodged men who were like Everard-Dog-Man but poorer and dirtier, and sometimes she didn’t manage to dodge, and she had learned to kick and butt and bite and sometimes just to endure. And finally she had found herself in London, which was louder and filthier and far more full of people than Watford. She had tried to get maid work, but she was too young and dirty and had no references. She soon learned to go to the servants’ entrance, but even there she seldom got past the door. She stood supplicant before the servants of those great fine houses, sometimes catching glimpses of warm kitchens stuffed with food, and was told to go away, that she was a thief and a gypsy, that the police had been called, that she was a disgrace.

Sometimes people were kind. Sometimes a cook or a maid or a knife-boy would slip her a bit of food. But no-one would hire her.

She saw girls her own age and younger going with men for money. Having lost the last of her innocence on the road, she knew that that was what she’d run from, that was what Dog Man had wanted, and that was why Charlotte was dead. Sometimes she thought that if she hadn’t run, at least they would be warm and fed; but having lost so much, she’d rather starve than do it now.

She was close enough to starving when she tried her first pocket, and failed. At the second, she was nearly caught. At the third she succeeded. Not much, a handkerchief. But you could sell handkerchiefs, if they were good enough, and then you could buy sausage or a bit of bread, and survive another day. She’d found it hard to resist a nice handkerchief ever since, no matter what else the mark might be carrying.

She learned. She learned to be quick and clever and to play the innocent if she was caught. She learned that if you approached someone rightly you could get them to
give
you their handkerchief and think they’d got the better of the bargain. She learned not to encroach on other thieves’ territory – or at least, not in ways they’d notice and chase you for.

She fell in with Ma Pether and found, for a little while, something like a home again, and something like a family.

The Britannia School

E
VELINE WOKE TO
the harsh clanging of a bell, with the memory of dreams fading in her head. Mama and Charlotte and Aiden, all long gone. Now there was only Eveline.

Miss Prayne was standing at the door swinging the bell from side to side. Her movements were vague and flat, and the bell rang without rhythm:
clang-ca-clang bang tang.
“Up, girls,” she said. The day had only just started, but she looked worn-out, like a cloth washed so many times it had lost most of its colour.

A double row of iron bedsteads stood on bare boards. Eveline’s bed was under a window, where a draught snuck about the frame, and farthest from the door.

There was an unlit fireplace at one side of the room, smaller than the ones downstairs. Either side of it were two unmatched dressers; one had been good, once, but was now so chipped and battered it would fetch no more than a pound at best. The other had been cheap to start with and had got no better. One of its drawers was missing both knobs, and the others stuck at various angles. Each held a jug, a bowl, and a small plate with a knob of pallid soap.

Hastings shuffled over to the dressers, yawning, picked up the jugs and went out.

The girls began to dress, shuffling their nightgowns off and their clothes on under the covers. Eveline followed suit; better to do what they all did for now.

Hastings returned with the jugs full of water.

The girls began to line up. Treadwell was first. Eveline and Hastings were at the back of the queue. Eveline because she was waiting to see what happened next, Hastings because Treadwell had given her a shove and told her to wait her turn.

One by one they washed, put their hair up in front of the tiny rust-spotted mirror, and lined up again by the door. By the time Hastings and Eveline got to the water it was grey and scummy. Eveline scrubbed her face vigorously none the less.

Through it all, Miss Prayne stared at a point somewhere beyond the far wall, as though watching something much more interesting than a gaggle of adolescent girls jostling for position and dropping hairpins.

Breakfast was porridge and bread, Assembly another speech about how lucky they were. Eveline, starting out with a full belly for the second day in a row and spare bread tucked in her pockets, was beginning to agree – though all the jaw about what rubbish they would all be without the Empire got her properly riled.

After Assembly came Disguise, run by the waspish and over-rouged Miss Fortescue.

She looked Eveline over. “New blood,” she sniffed.

She lined up pots and bottles, brushes and sponges and dyes. “Gutta-percha, putty, greasepaint, mortician’s wax – don’t make that face, girl, we don’t scrape the stuff off corpses. Wigs. Real hair is best, horsehair will do in a pinch or at a distance. Tools of the trade. But most of the time you’ll barely need all this. It’s in stance, voice, gait. Old women and young men move differently. Someone hiding a secret makes different gestures from someone declaring their love. Keep your eyes open. Watch. Go to the theatre, get backstage. Actors love to talk, and if you can get them off the subject of themselves, they’re a treasure-box. You there, new girl. Go behind that screen and take off your outer things.”

Eveline stood in her shift and stockings, shivering. Miss Fortescue joined her, her arms piled with clothes. Pulling Eveline around like a small child with a new doll, she dressed her, did things to her hair, and crammed a cap on her head. Then she pulled her out from behind the screen and sat her at a table by the window, where a mirror reflected back a small, pallid face under an overlarge tweed cap. “Not bad,” Miss Fortescue said. “But you still look like a girl. Class, pay attention. For a more masculine appearance, enlarge the nose. Just a bit, no need to make a Mr Punch of yourself.” She opened a pot containing a strange pink substance. “This is putty. It’s too pink, but it will do for this occasion.” She looked at Eveline via her reflection. “You’ll learn to make up your own, to match your skin. There’s no use using prosthetics the wrong colour, they’re far too obvious. You’re better off without. A little darkening on the jaw – not too much, just to square it, a brush of stubble. Don’t overdo it or you’ll look like a chimney sweep. Less is more, girls, less is always more.”

By the time she had finished, a slight but definite boy was looking out of the mirror. Eveline grinned at her reflection. She
liked
this class.

Treadwell said something to one of the other girls and an outburst of giggling followed. Miss Fortescue paid it no mind. Eveline noticed, but didn’t let it trouble her overmuch.

A
FTER
D
ISGUISE, SHE
was sent to the Old Barn. Low sun spilled across the front of the school, warming the ugly bricks to a gentler glow, and laying long tree-shadows on the rich green grass. The sound of champing and shuffling came from the stables.

Eveline paused, suddenly overwhelmed with memory. Home. The neighbour’s horses in the field, the chuffling of hens, the chatter of goblins in the roof of the barn. Sweet apples dropping on the grass for the wasps to find, if she didn’t get to them first.

Aiden, sitting on a branch, swinging his legs, smiling and calling out that she was slow, slow, she should come and see the spider-web all jewelled with dew that he had found for her... he had lifted it entire from its branch and placed it around her neck, flickering and glittering, a dance of tiny rainbows. But when, hours later, she meant to show Mama, it had all melted away.

She turned away from the sun and the woods and the memory and marched into the barn, her back rigid.

The Old Barn was a cavern of drifting dust and subtle gleams and pigeon-droppings. It smelled of oil and metal and the ghosts of long-gone hay. Something clanged, and a great plume of steam hissed out past Eveline, making her jump backwards.

“What is it?” A man appeared out of the steam, pushing back a pair of goggles like those the steam hansom drivers wore. He had a long, sour face and straight, thinning hair, and walked as though his joints had not been properly tightened, all lope and dangling hands. He wore what looked like a butcher’s apron, only made of leather, and thick leather gauntlets. “What do you want?”

“I’m here for Mechanics,” Eveline said.

“Hah! Well I suppose you’d better come in.”

“She’s here to study Etheric science, Mr Jackson,” came a voice. Hastings, also aproned and goggled.

“Oh, you’re
that
girl,” Mr Jackson said. “Etheric science. Hah. Hastings, show her the...” He gestured towards the back of the barn and turned away towards some great drum-bodied thing of tubes and dials and ugly dark-red paint like drying blood.

“Yes, Mr Jackson,” Hastings said. “Come along, all the stuff’s over here. At least, what there is.”

“But I don’t...” Eveline said.
Etheric science?
That was her mama’s work. She hadn’t heard the words in so long...

Feeling a strange fluttering in her throat, she followed Hastings.

A long, battered table stood by the wall. And on it... Eveline felt a sudden sharp pain around her heart, as though something had sunk its claws into her chest. She backed away, and sat down abruptly on a pile of old sacks.

Hastings realised she had lost her follower and turned round. “Is something wrong? Are you ill?”

“I’m not ill,” Eveline said, once she had her breath back, still staring at the machines. “Where’d those come from?”

Hastings looked at them and shrugged in her turn. “I don’t know, they just arrived. They’re Etheric machines, or that’s what Mr Jackson says.”

Eveline struggled to her feet. Hay dust puffed up around her, smelling of lost summers.

She walked over to the machines, carefully, slowly, as though they might turn on her like badly-treated dogs. She reached out her hand and ran it over a dial, stroked a loop of wire, caressed a layer of dust from a gleaming wooden casing.

“What is it?” Hastings said. “What’s the matter?”

“These were my mother’s.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure! See that chip?” Eveline pointed to the corner of a rosewood box with a flat, gleaming silver plate set into its top. “I done that when I was little, playing shuttlecock in her workroom. She’d told me not to...” Her voice broke and stopped. She swallowed down her grief, feeling it battling something else, something rising up the other way. “What are they
doing
here?”

“They were brought here for you, I suppose. What happened to your mama?”

“She died. She got some sort of sickness and she died.”

“Oh.” Hastings crumpled the edge of her apron in her fingers, staring at her feet. “I’m sorry.”

“Where’s yours?”

Hastings shook her head. “Birmingham, I think. Do you know how these work?”

Eveline looked at them, still strange and beautiful, gleaming under their dust. “They sing. They used to sing. But I don’t know how to make them do it, it was my mama did that. I don’t know why Holmforth thinks I can do it. He –”

Holmforth. He must have got these from Uncle James’s.

You may have the skills I need...

Her thoughts were whirling like a carousel at the fair. She stared at the machines, through a blur of tears, wiping them away with her hands.

“Hastings! Stop chattering and bring me that hammer.” Mr Jackson, head and shoulders inside the red machine, his voice distorted by the drum, gestured vaguely at a rack on the wall hung with tools.

“We’ll talk in a little,” Hastings said. “He’ll forget I’m here soon, he usually does.” She touched Eveline’s arm. “Sit down, you look awful.”

Hastings scurried off, and Eveline picked up the machine with the rabbit-ear on top, the one she remembered most clearly, and sat on one of the ancient rickety chairs, holding it on her lap the way she had held Charlotte, so long ago.

The Crepuscular

F
OX FELT AN
impulse in himself to go home... or at least, back.
Home
didn’t really apply any more. That was gone, such as it had been, and the land where it had stood was covered now with crammed, ugly buildings that no longer carried the scent of his family. No trees stood now to hush in the wind and shed leaves into spice-scented mounds of quick rustling life. The smell of snow was tainted as soon as it fell, and bore no delicate prints pointing the way to prey. Instead it was mushed almost immediately to a granular yellow-grey slush that held few marks, and stank of disease and bitter chemicals.