The Mysterious Case of Mr. Strangeway (The St. Croix Chronicles) (2 page)

I had learned very early in our relationship that Fanny would not loosen the strings to buy more laudanum ahead of her schedule; not unless the need was dire, and for that, I would need to be bleeding, keeping her up night after night with the terrors, or failing to breathe entirely.

There was enough in its crystal decanter for one, perhaps two more nights, yet she would not purchase more until Tuesday next. At the advice of Fanny’s own physician, no less.

Bleeding old goat. What kind of physician failed to prescribe laudanum in this day and age?

I was not sure I could manage past the week.

At that thought, a shudder crept down my back—a tremor I blamed on that cold, dank station with its looming shadows and gently fluttering bits of paper. The light flickered across the wall, providing an uncanny sense of watchfulness.

I was fortunate to be alone for my first visit. Later, when I finally crossed the path of another collector, I had already enjoyed some success and had developed a greater understanding of what it meant to be part of this disparate brotherhood. I knew to mind my tongue and let the other collector choose before I did, as a row beneath the drift for a potential pay-out was not worth the injuries that would result. Mine or his.

And by the time I learned that bit of wisdom, I’d also learned to take the bounty posted, rather than leave it on that blackened, soot-stained wall.

For this first adventure, I was but a novice.

Chapter Two

My strategy came down to the simple element of location. Mr. Strangeway, our heretofore unknown quarry, preferred the stews to polite company.

It was possible, of course, that he was not there, now. The stews was a swath of lanes and by-ways whose greatest claim lay in the entertainments that waited along them.

To be frank, I couldn’t cast too much blame on Mr. Strangeway for his tastes. In fact, to know that he—like me—lived in Chelsea and found himself adrift by night in London below created a sort of sympathy for his character.

Please remember, at this age, I was more akin—in my own thoughts—to the heroine of an adventure novel, not a wealthy heiress under the scrutiny of an unforgiving Society.

Certainly no waif ready to step into matters far beyond her understanding.

As I walked the lanes of the stews, my head down and my collar up, my breath fogging with every cough, I considered my next step. How to find Mr. Strangeway? Could I ask?

Would a man such as him be known so easily by name?

What if he was friend to all the dark and dangerous creatures of the night?

I was almost ready to talk myself out of such a straightforward commission, all because I was afraid to speak to the working women who ruffled skirts as I passed, or the men in greatcoats and fustian sleeves who laughed loudly as they shuffled from one gaming hell to the next.

I had no plan to get inside one. My disguise would not hold under scrutiny, and I hadn’t been prepared to take a collection so quickly.

Yet the facts were clear. I did not know what the man looked like. I couldn’t even begin to guess his favored haunt. There were many to choose from; too many, to be truthful, and therein lay its downfall. Five years later, many in the stews would close—the entertainments to be found in Limehouse would be the greater draw, and the Karakash Veil the victor in these subtle games of power.

Though these machinations were in play, I knew nothing of them, and the stews were filled with shadows and shapes—and noises that were not all kind in the scudding smoke.

“Lookin’ to ’come a man?” called a scratchy, hen-dry voice from my right.

Heat filled my cheeks. As I’d said, I was no stranger to the goings-on between a man and woman—especially where coin would exchange hands along the way—but I was in no market to become a man.

Her laughter followed me as I hurried across the narrow lane, my boots splashing in muck-ridden puddles. I could see my breath as I exhaled a harsh cough; a sound I heard mimicked now and again, but never from the doxies lining the way.

Nor, I suspected, from the footpads who waited nearby.

Something to do with acclimation, I thought. Those who lived in the devil fog for life would get used to its sting. Those of us who were not born below, nor ever raised in the abrasive murk, would stand out with a rasp and cough.

A clever system, for all it came about through no effort of the lower class inhabitants.

As I thought these things, feeling quite intellectual for figuring them out, I passed more women clad in worn coats and skirts hiked higher than they should be. I ignored more calls and teases, like cats hissing after a tumbled kitten, and I made sure to stay out of the path of any men who stumbled or strode down the lane around me.

All of whom that I could have asked, and failed to do so.

I would learn nothing this way.

Seizing my courage in both gloved hands, I made for a particular woman in a crimson corset—her bosom hefted neatly above and barely contained for all she jostled them in my direction. Red as the corset under her open cotton jacket, I stumbled out a greeting.

She laughed outright. “Look at th’ blighter,” was her return. “Poor, wee thing. Lookin’ for warmth?”

Not in the way she suggested. Tucking my cold hands into my pockets, I shook my head. Even then, I had the sense not to speak like the uppercrust gentry Fanny had tutored into me. “Lookin’ for a toff, miss.”

“Ain’t we all?” She laughed again, throwing back her head with its graying tendrils gleaming beneath the light. She was pretty enough, for an old bird with an impressive décolletage, but time and wear had taken most of her teeth and carved lines beside her rouged mouth. “Skiv off, then, I’m workin’.”

“Ain’t we all,” I repeated dryly, earning a full-lipped grin. “Maybe you seen him? Cove by name of Strangeway.”

Now, she planted her hands on her hips and faced me square. “Strange!”

“Why?” I asked. “Someone else come about?”

“Only them what he owes.” A snort. “Strange is about, a slang cove in a whistle.”

This took me a moment. According to the cant shared by most anyone who made the streets into a bit of claimed turf,
slang
meant fetters, the iron kind, and a whistle was the throat, to be wetted by a stiff drink. The Cockney in her words was new enough to my ears that I had some trouble following. Of all the places I’d ever been, only them what lived in earshot of the Bow Bell in Cheapside had a way of speaking that twisted the brain.

I couldn’t figure out what she meant by
slang cove in a whistle
, and she did not allow me the time to work it out.

“Always bit of coin to spare for the girls,” she was already saying, “even if he’s not always sparin’ ’em, know what I mean?” She elbowed the post beside her as if it could share in her guttural humor.

I bared my teeth in what I hope passed for a smile. This part I could understand easy enough.
Wastrel.
I knew it. “Where’d he go, then? I’ve—” What was my excuse? A simple lie would suffice easy enough. “—a message for him.”

This soiled dove with her bright red corset for all to see, she was nobody’s fool. Her gaze, erudite in ways them from above would never understand, sized me up the way I imagine she sized up any man who wandered near her. “Don’t butcher like a runner. You from the Friars?”

I just couldn’t parse it. Butchers? Friars? “I beg your pardon?”

“Oh, dearie me.” Now her arms folded across her chest, her chin jutted with a hint of softness about her jowls. Her eyes sparkled black in the fog-drifting light. “Mite you be, but this side a toff, if your mouth ain’t tellin’. What sorry cat died and tossed you in the low?”

I blinked at her.

She sighed; the same exasperated sound I often heard from Fanny. And wouldn’t my governess throw a row to hear me say so? Likened to a Cheapside prostitute, of all the nerve.

“Right, right,” she said briskly. “‘Ere’s me, askin’ none. Strange’ll be at the Nunnery, same as he is Thursday most.”

My smile tipped to something genuine as I patted my borrowed pockets. “Thank you right, miss. I think I’ve got—”

“Hsst!” She waved me into silence. “A runner don’t share with a tail, not ‘less it’s worth more bread. More bread, more like we’re friends, right?” Partially right, anyway. A good informant could be invaluable, and worth more coin for it. “Friends” were not to be made lightly. She squinted one eye at me. “You after Strange’s pockets?”

Not by design. “No, miss.”

“Then there weren’t in it for me, is there?” Her red mouth twisted into a pout. “Won’t blow more’n I oughter, nice kinchin you are. Off wit’ you, then. The Nunnery’s just down the way, you’ll see the shingle.”

I could have spun her about the street, but for the fact it’d cost me a coin or two. As far as my first go at asking a stranger for the whereabouts of a mark, I had imagined it progressing so much worse.

“Thank you, miss,” I said brightly.

“You’ll remember Red Lettie when y’need a dicky again, aye?”

“Aye,” I promised. Not only would I remember her, but she would provide many a word—what she called a dicky bird in her nonsensical dialect—over the next year, until the fever finally allowed her the rest she never found in the streets she lived in.

“Right. Scarp off, then.”

It would do. Happily, I did as she suggested, scarpering off into the dark.

There’s a talent to it, scarpering. I was better at it when I was younger, and therefore smaller, for it’s not a natural way of running for them what grow big. It is a process of motion that is one part scurrying, like a rat, and one part clinging to the shadiest bits of a path. All as soundless as possible. A body so learned could move in any street, and London’s thick fog only made it the easier.

If only Monsieur Marceaux knew the extent to which I would put his training, he might have visited Mr. Ashmore simply to demand interest paid.

The shingle Red Lettie spoke of was one of many dotting the lane. Some hung, such as pub signs carved with rudimentary shapes, and others were more elegantly painted. There was the Swan, the Brass Monocle, the Mad Tapper Bell, and, my personal favorite of all the names then and now, the Cardinal’s Hat.

I would visit each over the next few months, some for curiosity and some for business, but not tonight. The shingle I searched for was not hung at all, but painted on the blackened brick. The kneeling woman in soot-smeared white
could
be considered praying, yet was more likely not at all engaged in an act so remotely pious.

The Nunnery was nothing like its name suggested. No Churchman would be caught setting foot inside—at least not where any could see, and not without a fervent prayer for redemption.

A large man stood before the narrow lane leading, I assumed, to the entry. The crumbling brick around him sported all the usual scars expected of the stews—broken casements, boarded windows, puddles gathering between cracked cobbles. Light seamed from several of the windows above, casting a shrouded, wicked yellow glow on the thick pea-souper I inhaled with every breath.

If the Nunnery was any more or less raucous than the others, I couldn’t tell it by the noise. The stews were rarely quiet, often filled with the cat-calls of the dollymops at work, or the laughter of the carousers who stumbled from one hell to the next.

The cove guarding the front entry didn’t look the sort to turn a blind eye to a troublemaker as I presented. With ginger whiskers at his wide jaw and narrow, inset eyes glowering at the paying customers who passed him, he seemed instead the sort who might cause a ruckus where I needed none. To get in, I would have to get past him—and then what? If Mr. Strangeway were inside, I’d then have to ask as discreetly as possible so as not to alert him to my presence.

Was Mr. Strangeway the violent sort?

A dubious prospect, at best. If he were one of those prodigal sons so often found in Chelsea’s inner fold, he would likely turn out to be a third son or distant relation eager to spend what coin he accrued on such flights of fancy as women and wine.

Not at all like myself. The laudanum I took was for medicinal purposes; hadn’t the doctors assured Fanny that?

Smiling, I edged away from the footman’s view, humming a tuneless bit under my breath. It was one of those merry little ditties I’d picked up in the company of other children like myself. In time, I would forget it—just as I’d forgotten so much to the mists of opium.

A fair trade. A new life free of Marceaux’s threats and villainy in exchange for a few memories seemed as good a bargain as any I could have chosen.

After all, I’d found a way to shimmy free of the bindings Fanny seemed so determined to place on me, hadn’t I?

Feeling right clever, I avoided the main lanes in favor of the narrow tracks running between the hells. With my location firmly pinned in my mind’s eye, I navigated turns and twists and back-alley courtyards until I closed in upon the Nunnery’s secondary portico.

With each step I took, it was as if the trappings of damp and cold fell away. I could feel the stirrings of fear and nervousness, certainly, but with it, anticipation. Eagerness. I was all but chomping at the imaginary bit for a taste of this quarry, a trail, a clue! A man, and not in any sense of the way Fanny would have demanded it. Marriage, to a girl my age, seemed so far away. I could only smother a giggle at the reversal I’d taken it.

I sought a man, all right. But this one was not for marrying.

Cherry St. Croix, newly minted collector, poised just beneath the casement that would lead to her first successful acquisition.

My first victory, my first large purse, only a crack away.

I could all but taste the bitter spice of a draught on my tongue, so sure was I that I had won this collecting game.

And therefore, I was most surprised when a man made of metal crashed to the cobbles beside me.

Chapter Three

I shrieked; a sound swallowed by the echoed cacophony of cracking resin and screeching metal on brick as the figure landed more or less upon his feet, yet fell heavily against the Nunnery’s back wall.

In the choppy light afforded from the windows, I saw a round, bucket-shaped helmet of some kind, dulled to a lusterless finish. Bits of reflected glass glinted from where the eyes might be. Arms layered with plates of the same flat, drab color splayed against the wall, and the definitive creak of leather—likely an under-padding—accompanied his hasty straightening.

If he counted me as anything more than a simple passer-by playing witness to his jaw-dropping entrance, I doubted it. He did not spare me much attention, and his hastily growled, “Collector’s business!”—a phrase I have long since adopted for my own use—dismissed me summarily.

I quite expected the windows overhead to fill with gaping eyes, yet they remained empty. The noise of the Nunnery and the stews about us continued unabated.

Wouldn’t such a thing—a metal man leaping from within—cause a stir?

The man in question had already dusted his strange plating off and turned away when the rest of my thoughts snapped firmly into place.

Collector’s business?

This man in armor was a collector?

My eyes narrowed, blood pulsing suddenly hot and aggravated in my veins.

This collector was after my bounty!

“Not one more step,” I demanded, reaching for the strange device affixed to his back. It looked much like a set of copper tubes, plated together under a sheet of metal, and bulky besides. I intended to halt him, yet my fingers found no purchase; less so when he quickly side-stepped my grasp and turned to face me direct.

“Off with you, scamp,” he said, that bucket head of his turning his voice to something both tinny and growled.

“
I
have collector’s business,” I returned hotly, “and
you
are on
my
mark.”

For a moment, he was still. The lights from behind us bathed his strange suit in a ribbon of glinted light and oiled leather, what seemed like shades of faded green and darkest brown cut with tarnished copper and brass. From between, I saw stripes in green, purple and blue—muted in shade, yet still oddly more dapper than I expected. The pouches hanging at his waist bulged, as if filled to the brim, whereas others were corded and narrow, sealed against my prying eyes. There was a holster affixed to his side, strapped to one leather-clad and plated leg, but it was empty.

What weapon would fit in such a wide sheath? Where had he left it?

I met his returned scrutiny with a wide-eyed glower, as fierce as I could muster. When he moved, I stiffened, prepared to fend off this armored figure with naught but my gloved hands and a prayer.

Then, a noise leaked out from under the mask. A choke. A snort.

The rotter was
laughing
.

“Stop that,” I ordered, far too haughtily for the urchin I pretended to be.

He paid my demand no mind. “A wee thing like you? A collector?” His laughter deepened, for all I received the impression he was attempting to stifle it. “No, no, you’re pulling my leg, aren’t you?” He tapped his helmet; it did not ring like the bell I half expected it to be. “Good one, lad. Very good. I’m afraid you’ll have to go without a coin for it.”

My jaw tightened as I bit back the caustic words my pride demanded I unleash.

Finally, laughter evened to a few snorts and sniggers, he sighed like a man satisfied and dismissed me. “Get on back to your mum,” he told me. “There’s a good lad.” He reached out with a gloved hand, the plates on the back of it clicking gently.

Perhaps he meant to pat me on the head like the good lad I wasn’t. I did not allow it.

I seized his wrist in both of mine, yanked him hard as if I would force him to run into me. I pivoted into his chest when his balance skewed and he tottered forward. The motion caught him so off guard that my elbow collided with the breastplate—sending stunning shocks of pain through to my shoulder—and he stumbled off my slighter figure like I were a lamppost and he the fool who ran into it.

The act allowed me two advantages. It put him off his balance, which then let me wriggle out from under his flailing arms and push him hard against the Nunnery wall.

That
rang like the bell I’d hoped to hear.

This act was not an uncoordinated one. When one is caught between assailant and hard surface, it is an excellent way to get behind the ruffian and avoid being caught by him.

Usually because one’s fingers are in his pocket.

Which, in my case specifically, was exactly the issue. The gaping utility pouch hanging from his sturdy belt provided too much a temptation for old habits, and so I claimed the advantage.

Paper crinkled in my hand. I leapt back before the armored collector’s sudden change of balance earned me a boxing. His hand sailed over my head, where my ears had just been.

I may have caught him off guard this time, but it wasn’t a trick I’d be able to use twice. Not against a man more than my height and armored, beside.

I danced back, hiding my hand behind my back as I smiled ear to ear. The parchment was heavier than it should be, a bit of something tucked inside, and a titch more than the weight of any coin I had filched before. “Teach you to lay hands on a collector,” I taunted.

“Right.” He shoved off the wall, spinning with greater ease than armor should have allowed. “You’ve earned a right good bolloxing.” This warning came on a muffled uncivility I couldn’t make out, but I did not stay close at hand to ask him to repeat it.

My thoughts went as such: I had gone to collect Mr. Strangeway. This armored collector had obviously gone to do the same. That he was leaving now, empty-handed and with no sign of Mr. Strangeway, suggested that our mutual quarry was not at the Nunnery—despite a reputation for spending most Thursday evenings ensconced within.

The coin-laden parchment I’d taken might give me a clue, but the drubbing I’d get if I lingered would ensure a very quick end to my newly claimed profession.

And so, as the collector reached for me, I turned tail and ran.

I had no destination in mind—only the habits borne of more than a few years dodging rozzers and angry marks alike. In some cases, isolation was the key to a successful escape attempt.

In many others, however, it became a game of crowds.

I sprinted down the alleys I’d come through, rounding back on my own trail, darting between lanes. I hadn’t learned about the Cat’s Crossing yet, so I did not think to utilize the sloping roofs and intricate maze by which the most agile of the below drift urchins made good their own escape routes.

Agile primarily because of the dangers involved. I would learn this too.

But not this time. As the rhythmic echo of the collector’s heavy footsteps came closer, faded, doubled back, I played cat and mouse in the lanes I’d only just learned myself.

By the time I stumbled from the narrow mouth of a neighboring lane, I was plastered with sweat and likely covered in the gray streaks that so characterized London below. Such was the momentum of my exit that fog blew past me in thick wafts of black cotton, tinged yellow by the lamplight.

Yet no eyes turned to me in the choked street.

Instead, a disturbance had erupted near the Nunnery gatekeeper—that large man who had so caused me concern before. A knot had gathered, men shouting in anger and dismay, as two plain-dressed men tussled with the gatekeeper.

The man put up a solid front. No one was getting in, I gathered from the calls. No one was getting out.

There had been a problem inside.

A problem that involved a man in armor, perhaps?

I tsk’d silently to myself as I straightened my coat and hat, and shoved the bit of paper into my pocket for later reading by stronger light.

“We wants in!” shouted a man, and the footman palmed his face with a large hand and shoved him back.

“Git off,” he ordered, a gust of wind driven by hoarse pipes. “Nobody in, y’ear me?”

Nobody in, perhaps. But from my vantage across the lane, I watched a slim figure slip from the Nunnery door, glance briefly at the gathered crowd and the straining back of the footman who held them, and pause to pick a rolled bit of white from his own pocket.

Was this, then, Mr. Strangeway?

Impossible. The notice had claimed the man lived in Chelsea. This fine figure in tailored coat and jauntily perched bowler could not possibly be my quarry.

The man had skin dark as the polished wood tables I’m told my father imported from far-flung India. His eyes, bottomless in the shadowed brim of the hat, flicked this way and that—impossible to tell the color from such a distance, but most certainly not pale. The shape of his jaw was finely cut, the light gleaming from his skin turning a faintly purple hue.

His clothing suggested finery, his bearing indicated polish, and he was—even by my rather naively jaded standards—handsome.

Some servant, perhaps. A man sent to pay off a debt or collect a wayward lordling from the stews before scandal caught on.

A spark caught, glowed cheery bright, and a plume of smoke drifted from his pursed lips.

A cigarette. Not quite the fashionable pastime of the upper-class.

Whoever this man was, I briefly entertained the notion of following him for a spell. I wagered that he’d lead to all sorts of curiosities, this coffee-skinned man in the finery of a toff. Perhaps he was, quite opposite my own design, a servant who had stolen some lord’s clothing for a night about the stews. Or he was a man of adventure playing at wealth.

I wished him well, this enigmatic fellow, and prepared to leave without fuss.

Yet as if the smoke told him of my presence, his head turned, tipped back slightly. I was left with the impression that I’d been seen, and not only seen but studied. Even from a distance, I felt the weight of that gaze.

Very white teeth flashed in the shadows. A nod, a gentleman’s gesture. Before I could respond—and how, I had not quite decided, for I was a street boy in this guise—he turned away from the straining mob of angry men and sauntered back down the alley. He would come out where the metal man had fallen, and if he were unlucky, the collector would be waiting.

Then again, what did he have to fear from a collector after my mark?

Nothing, certainly. Whoever the man, whatever the course his ambitions would chart for him, he was not my quarry, and the man in armor was not likely to care.

I
was the one who would find Mr. Strangeway first, and I would have to do it before anyone else.

That purse, all that coin, would be mine.

The things I would buy with it, the delights I would allow myself. Periodicals, books aplenty.

And a flask extra of laudanum for those difficult times, so that I could better sleep without stoking Fanny’s concern.

All but floating upon the promise of such easy coin, I made my way back into the crowded stews, visions of the future dancing merrily in my thoughts. I had all but forgotten the mysterious parchment crinkling in my pocket; it was too dark along the way to read it, anyhow, and nothing was more suspicious than a kinchin cove with his nose in letters.

From ferry to skulking beyond the lamps of London above, from the narrow avenues reserved for the staff and servants of the uppercrust I found myself living among, all was quiet.

By the time I made my way back to the kitchen door, creeping my way through the shrubbery of the neighboring home, I was too tired to contemplate anything but hiding my pilfered clothing and falling into bed. The note would wait.

That night, I did not reach for the laudanum. It was the first I’d neglected to do so in a very long time.