Whitechapel Gods (7 page)

“Why were you following me, miss?” he asked, voice flat as cold slate.

She retreated one step from the force in the man’s eyes and managed to sound cross.

“I’ve told you already, sir. Well, I can see you’re not interested. Good day to you and I’ll be on my way.”

She stuck her nose up and spun away. What on earth had possessed her to trail this man into the Blink of all places?
Dignified, now. Slow down. Dismiss him. He’s nothing at all.

His hand engulfed her shoulder and spun her back around like a top. She found herself staring into startling blue eyes, as hard as steel. She tugged the flick-blade loose. A quick poke and he would drop like a domino, just as before.

From some unexplored part of her, a primal rage welled up, a screaming order to thrust the knife through his heart. He deserved it. They all did. All these cruel and lecherous swine that thought they had so much power.

She pressed the catch and the blade leapt into place. Was it the eyes that made her hesitate? Was he just that much faster?

He never broke their gaze. His other hand snatched her wrist the instant she began to thrust. Shoots of pain darted up and down Missy’s arm and out into her fingers. She cried out and the knife clattered to the street.

She couldn’t move her arms. She couldn’t run. He leaned in closer, filling her nose with his scent.

“Listen!” he hissed. “Do not continue following us. My associates are heartless villains and they will murder you. Do you understand?”

She nodded meekly. He shoved her away.

“Play your
Versuchung
games elsewhere.”

She nodded again, swallowed to quell the shaking of her insides, and retreated. She kept him in sight, watching his eyes and his firing hand until she reached the little plaza, then spun and bolted down the nearest alley. She ran through the twists and turns, bashing her elbows on the downspouts and scuffing her dress on the walls, and did not halt until the vast lamp-lit cavern of the Underbelly opened around her.

She found a rotting crate behind a bakery where no one could see her from the streets, and sat down. Tears poured out of her eyes, soaking her cheeks and chin, dribbling onto her jacket.

“No, no, no,” she muttered. She crammed her fists into her eye sockets.

Do you require further demonstration of how powerless you are, child? Surrender these unladylike ideas of independence and return to me.

Her entire body shivered. Her insides rolled and squirmed. A sharp pain began throbbing between her legs. From inside her mind, Matron Gisella fixed her with a tight-lipped scowl.

The world abounds in examples of your weaknesses. You are as frightened a little girl now as you were when you were dumped upon my doorstep.

No, no, no, no…

She pulled her slick fists away from her face and clamped them down on her legs and then her arms, until they went stone still. Then she hugged her midsection so tightly she thought she might break it.

She held herself in that death’s grip until her insides stilled and Gisella’s voice fell silent. Then she inhaled with great deliberation, rose, straightened her clothing, wiped her face.

She would get another knife. She would get a gun. Then she would teach that Kraut bastard not to make her feel like that. She would teach anyone who crossed her that she was powerless no longer.

She headed for the hideout.

I see a great city behind my closed eyes. It is the vision of all my failures of architecture, standing together against all possibility. I see humanity living on these creations, driven far from the mud of which they are made. I see our homes and churches broken; I see our God snubbed and ignored; I see our books rendered unreadable by smoke and by ashes.

—IX. ii

A passing wash of smoke hid the platform even as the cable car settled into its berth. Oliver had tied his kerchief over his mouth and nose before disembarking, but that did little to stop the sudden burst of fire in his lungs at the first taste of the air. This close to the Stack, breathing and not breathing were of equal detriment to one’s health.

The Dunbridge Concourse was constructed on a sharply slanting hill with the station at its base. By virtue of the way the steel girders had grown up, the black cloaks had elected to build only on the west side of the tower; the east stood open to the air and the rain. The dwellings of Dunbridge rested one atop the other, with all the order of a stack of rubbish, and for the most part were devoid of light.

Every station and street they’d passed through in Stepneyside and Cambridge-Heath had been crawling with gold cloaks. Even the women and children members of that bizarre order worked the crowds, eyeing up the midday commuters as they passed. The burlier and better-armed canaries randomly hauled people from the crowd to perform searches of their pockets. This had happened to Oliver only once, and he was able to palm his knife and derringer while the man roughed him over. The cloak had contemptuously shoved him aside to make space for the next victim, whom his lackeys were already dragging up.

“This is an affront to basic human dignity,” Hews had said. “What do they honestly expect to find with all this? In the whole of Whitechapel, we can’t number more than a few dozen.”

“Spreading fear, perhaps,” Oliver had suggested, “to scare the average cove away from helping us.”

Hews had perked up at that, and a little of that prideful red glow came back into his cheeks. “Ha. British men don’t scare that easily.”

Oliver had thought of Missy. “Neither do the women.”

After that, they’d both lapsed into silence. The constant proximity of Grandfather Clock’s followers and occasionally the Boiler Men limited the instances of their conversation.

Oliver was dying to know more about this Aaron. He wanted to know how a man who knew so much could be allowed to fall into enemy hands. When asked, Hews snapped that it was not the time to discuss it and fell back to his silent worrying.

Hews’ first breath as they stepped out of the car sent him into a fit of coughing. Oliver hooked his arm and gently drew him out of the way of the rest of the passengers as the coughs evolved into wet hacks. It was several minutes before Hews regained his composure. He righted himself and wiped the spittle away from beneath his kerchief. A sudden sheen of sweat mixed with the soot on his face. The man seemed drained of all vitality and every seeming of health.

“That entertaining, am I?” Hews croaked.

Oliver swallowed. “Is it…?”

“Cancer of the lungs, aye,” Hews said. “The same as took my Barbara.”

“You might have told me.”

“You knew it,” Hews scolded. “As a lad, you were never less than observant. She always told me so.”

“There’s a difference, knowing it and hearing it,” Oliver said.

“You needn’t tell me that, lad.”

They stood in silence a moment, while Hews stowed his handkerchief and tied on a fresh one from his vest pocket.

“She was kind to me,” Oliver said to fill the silence.

“Aye, she was. And her only price was the enduring of her constant sermons, bless her Anglican, Anglican soul.”

Hews cleared his throat and straightened his coat and hat. “Well,” he said. “Now that I’m done making a spectacle of myself, let’s get on, shall we?”

“But…are you all right?” Oliver asked.

“Chipper as the day I shot out of my mum, lad. I’ll have none of your pity.” He began a brisk walk. Oliver scrambled to keep pace.

The station exited onto the lowest point of the concourse: a half bowl of concrete that sported benches, unconvincing false trees, and dormant wrought-iron lampposts of angular design. It was almost deserted, owing, Oliver figured, to the choking air. A black cloak scuttled by, moving on all fours like a spider, emitting an audible mechanical grinding as she moved.

Oliver shied away.

“Sold their souls,” Hews said once she had gone. “Nothing in their hearts now but a few lumps of burning coal and Mama Engine’s excrement.”

And they’d do it to all of us, if we let them,
Oliver thought. The metal grew in a human being as easily as in a tower or a factory; a man would not know he had it until black iron started poking through his skin. Thomas was already half a machine, and he had never joined any order.

In a few steps they lost themselves in the fog.

“I hope you know the way, Hewey.”

Hews waved him on. “I know it better than my own wrinkles, lad. Just follow me, and make sure there’s something under your foot before you commit to the step.”

Oliver halted in midstride, foot hanging above the concrete ahead. The air was so thick, holes in the concourse would not be readily apparent. He shot Hews a venomous look.

“Did I not look preoccupied enough for you?”

“Not at all, lad. Just wanted to warn you to watch your step, that’s all. One never knows, in a place like this.”

“You’re a fiend, Hewey,” Oliver said. For emphasis, he stomped his front foot down hard. The satisfying smack of rubber on concrete echoed back up.

Hews smiled weakly. “Mr. Savvy today, eh? Well, if you take such pride in your own wit, try to tell me where we are twenty minutes from now.”

Frowning, Oliver followed Hews’ ghostly shadow through the smog to the start of a rickety staircase. They ascended several storeys before coming to a landing, then found another stair, another landing, another stair, and so on for what seemed an eternity. Never could Oliver see more than five paces in front of him. Soot-stained walls and greasy windows passed by on both sides. The heavy air suppressed all ambient sound, until all Oliver could hear was his own breathing and footsteps.

Hews paused on a landing to catch his breath. Oliver stumbled up beside him.

“Does it worry you that we haven’t seen another living soul this whole time?” he asked.

Hews panted, and spoke with a scratch in his voice. “All staying inside, slothful buggers. Some buildings here are connected by tunnels, where the air isn’t so bad.”

“Then why are we out here?”

“So no one can bloody see us. This is a
secret
meeting, in case you’d missed that.”

The aforementioned twenty minutes passed and Oliver had to admit that he was hopelessly lost. After a few more landings, Hews led them to a pitted oak door and into a lit parlour.

The air within was almost as smoky as that without. Heat pushed its way past Oliver as he entered, filling his nostrils with the smells of opium and human sweat.

“Even in Whitechapel you can’t escape these damnable places,” Hews muttered.

A single oil lamp with an Oriental paper shade hung from a hook in the ceiling. Its wan light illuminated a dozen or more men lying about the room on couches and carpets, twitching in their rumpled clothes. No one moved. No one spoke. Only a moaning from an area on the left, cordoned off by hanging curtains, dared break the silence.

Stepping carefully over the still forms on the floor, Oliver followed Hews to the back. Hews rapped on the door there, to the rhythm of “Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond.” It opened, revealing a squat, hair-lipped Chinese woman of considerable age.

Hews doffed his hat. “Mrs. Flower, a pleasure, as always.”

She greeted him with a wrinkled smile and some words in a singsong dialect, and ushered them both inside. She led them through a tiny back room equipped with several short tables and stools and a potbellied stove. A skeletal Chinese girl laboured over the stove, grating cake opium into a sieve that sat over a pot of boiling water. Mrs. Flower led them to a stained curtain against the back wall and drew it aside.

“Here’s one more.” It was Bailey’s rough voice. “Is anyone with you, Lewis?”

“Only Mr. Sumner,” Hews replied. “Where are the others?”

The Chinese woman gestured for Oliver to follow.

Oliver turned his attention to the room, to find it lit only by a half-dozen thick candles in the centre of the room’s circular table. Spots of smoke and grease blackened the plaster walls. Bailey, Sims, and two gentlemen Oliver had never seen before occupied the table.

One of the unknown men, a red-faced gentleman with precisely cut moustache and sideburns, replied, “We can only hope for them.”

“Just hurry and seat yourselves,” Bailey barked. “We haven’t a lot of time.”

Hews settled into the last empty chair. Oliver stood at a loss for a moment, feeling more and more the impatience of those assembled, and finally elected to fetch a stool from the previous room. He seated himself on it and tried not to look as ridiculous as he felt, a head shorter than all the rest with his knees pulled up to his chest.

“Thank you,” Bailey said to Oliver, with edged sarcasm. He sucked a moment on his cigar and then addressed the table. “I see four missing.”

One of the two unknowns, a bald man in an expensive suit and pince-nez spectacles replied, “We got the word through. Perhaps they are simply tardy.”

“A fanciful hope,” Bailey said. “The canaries have been assaulting our hides since dawn, even my own. Until they knock at the door, we will assume the others have met their fate, so it falls to us to tackle the task at hand.”

“The task at hand is escape,” said the unknown moustachioed man. “Grandfather Clock and Baron Hume won’t soon forget about us, and with everything Aaron knew we’d best vacate the city and get the Crown to send someone else.”

Bailey’s heavy brows dropped low. His cheeks creased around the edges of his moustache in a scowl. “Our
task
is to retrieve the ticker tape that was Aaron’s objective. According to our source in Scared’s organisation, one of Aaron’s crew fell from Aldgate with it in his possession. John Scared is certainly already looking for it, and perhaps the baron, too. We must move with all possible haste if we are to discover it first.”

“Why is it important?” Oliver asked, and immediately wished he hadn’t. Bailey glared at him as he might a child who had spoken out of turn. Only the bald, bespectacled man spoke up.

“Yes, out with it,” the man said. “You’ve kept us all too far in the dark on this. Since Grandfather Clock and his pet baron almost certainly know by now, your compatriots aught to.”

Sims and the other unknown nodded their heads.

Bailey’s glare lingered on Oliver for a moment, cigar smoke curling up his cheeks.

“Then I will start at the beginning.” He addressed the table again. “Our conundrum has been this, gentlemen. With careful planning, we could probably assassinate the baron, and with enough men, we could probably defeat the cloaks, but such acts do us no service as long as the Lord and Lady survive. Ultimately, we require a method to slay them in order to ensure their influence is gone from England, but bodiless as they are, we’ve encountered no lack of difficulty with this. Aaron has been, for some years, working on a way to kill Grandfather Clock and Mama Engine.”

“And he found such a method?” the bald man asked, leaning forward.

“No. He told me from the start that the task was beyond him. It was John Scared who found a way.”

Low muttering passed across the table. Oliver reeled a bit on his tiny stool. John Scared was the baron’s lapdog, his eyes and ears on the Whitechapel streets. Could this be dissention in the enemy ranks?

Bailey continued. “Scared placed the calculations for this method on a coded ticker tape. Aaron insisted on leading a team to steal it.”

It was the bald man’s turn to reel back. “And you let him? God, with how much he knew…”

“He argued that John Scared would have set out traps too devious to deal with without his…special talents. From what our source has told me of Scared’s lair, I had no reason to doubt this.”

“But the risks, man!”

“The rewards more than outweighed them, sir,” Bailey said, overpowering the smaller man. “At last a way to free Whitechapel from these God-cursed machines! What risk isn’t worth that? And the opportunity is still there. Our task, gentlemen, is to retrieve that tape, implement whatever strategy it contains, and get it into the Stack to do its work.”

Hews rubbed his muttonchops. “No small order.”

“I don’t anticipate any one of us keeping his freedom very much longer,” Bailey replied. “So we must abandon the dark lantern shenanigans we’ve been playing at, anonymity included, since it is likely the baron already knows our identities. Joyce, get your engineering crew ready for anything that tape may contain.” The moustachioed man nodded. “Lewis, you and Lawrence will need to pull in your connections in the Stack. We may need access to the Chimney or the Work Chamber.”

Oliver visibly cringed at the mention of the dead man’s name. He inhaled and mentally plucked up his courage. Now it would come out that Lawrence had met his end at the hands of a comrade, and Bailey would sack him. Well, then, Oliver would simply run a rebellion on his own again, nervous as that made him feel.

Hews just nodded. “We’ll get it done,” he said.

“Good,” said Bailey. He turned to give orders to Sims and the other man.

Hews had lied straight to Bailey’s face. A lie of omission. Oliver was aghast. It wasn’t just for his sake, surely? But why else would Hews do such a thing?

“Sumner.”

Oliver snapped to attention to find Bailey glaring at him from behind his thick moustache.

“Do you have Lawrence’s manual?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. With luck, it will contain a key to decode Scared’s tape.”

Oliver raised his eyebrows.

Hews leaned over and muttered an explanation: “Lawrence was in contact with Scared through intermediaries. He’d been compiling this for some time.”

“We will be using the Shadwell Underbelly to gain access to the downstreets,” said Bailey. “I want your people to loiter in the lift station and on the main street and to monitor the activity of cloaks and Boiler Men. Distract them or assault them as necessary, but keep them away from our point of egress so we can be certain of a clear path back. When we have obtained the tape, we will pass it into your hands, and you must see it safely to Joyce’s workshop since we are unable to move freely on the streets now that our faces are known. If the Boiler Men arrive at Shadwell in force, you are to give us fair warning and perhaps a distraction while we escape to the Docks Tower.”