Madame Orlov received him in her boudoir at the top of the Silk House, among a hundred silk cushions and a smell of rosewater and opium, wearing a dressing gown of peacock-green satin and an expression of profound boredom.
She was a big woman, somewhere past fifty, with a heavy-jawed handsome face caked in white powder, black hair piled high and stuck through with jewelled pins, and small, shrewd, black-currant eyes.
She sat in a carved chair like a throne, with a tiny white dog asleep in her lap, and she listened to Lucan’s proposal without interrupting once.
Above her head, his eyes read: Owes: 0.
Is owed: 3,100 silver (various gentlemen).
4 favours (Commissioner).
1 life (Varney, Saul — girl named Lark, 1866).
When he’d finished, she stroked the little dog’s ears for a long time.
“Saul Varney,” she said at last, “has put the word out that anyone who buys from you will have their hands nailed to their counter.”
“Yes.”
“In Tallowgate.”
“Yes.”
“This,” said Madame Orlov, “is not Tallowgate.
This is Velvet Row.
And on Velvet Row, Saul Varney is a little man in a cheap tweed suit who once took a girl of mine called Lark into his back room to teach her a lesson about manners, and sent her back to me in a sack.” Her black-currant eyes didn’t blink.
“I have been waiting five years for someone to put a sword through Saul Varney.
I hear somebody finally has.” She tilted her head.
“I don’t suppose you’d know who?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“No.
Of course not.” She smiled, and the white powder cracked at the corners of her mouth.
“Ten bottles of your golden water.
Four hundred silver, clean, paid now.
And in future, Mr.
Thorne, you’ll sell to no other house on the Row but mine.”
“Five hundred.”
“Four hundred and fifty, and I’ll tell you something about Jebediah Gorse that you’ll want to know.”
Lucan held out his hand.
Madame Orlov didn’t shake it.
She extended her own instead, palm down, heavy with rings, so that he would have to kiss it.
He looked at it for a moment.
Then he did.
“Gorse,” she said, “has been selling children out of Coldwater Mill for nine years.
To the Throat, mostly.
Sometimes to other places.
Places I wouldn’t send a dog.
I’ve tried to buy those children three times.
He won’t sell to me.
He says I’d spoil them.” She pulled her hand back.
“He has a friend.
A very powerful friend, in a very high place.
Every time anyone tries to touch him, the Bureau files go missing and the Constables get sent somewhere else.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know his name.
Gorse calls him the Seventh.
Some gentleman in the Chamber of Commerce.” She shrugged her heavy shoulders.
“But I know who’d know.
There’s only one copper in the Bureau who’s ever tried to touch Gorse, and she’s been trying for years, and she’s never once got close.” She looked at him shrewdly.
“But then, I hear you’ve met the Inspector already.”
[ CLEAN CURRENCY acquired: 450 Silver.
]
[ Rank 2 progress — 2 / 3 blood-debts.
10,250 / 10,000 Clean Silver laundered.
✓ ]
One condition met.
One to go.
The boarding house was in the Lamplighters’ Quarter, on a quiet street called Hollin Row, three storeys of grey brick with a brass knocker shaped like a lion’s head and window boxes full of dead geraniums.
It was the kind of place where widowed schoolmistresses and junior clerks rented rooms by the month, and the landlady locked the front door at ten.
Lucan didn’t use the front door.
It was after midnight.
He climbed the iron drainpipe at the back of the building with the Climber’s Iron on his hands, as he’d climbed the spoil chute, one careful handhold at a time.
His ribs were strapped and still ached at every breath.
Rook couldn’t come.
Rook couldn’t walk.
The window on the third floor was the only one with a light behind it.
He knocked softly on the glass.
There was a long pause.
Then the curtain twitched aside, and Maren Voss looked out at him, in her shirtsleeves, with a pistol in her brass hand pointed at his face through the glass.
She looked at him for a long moment.
Then she sighed, put the pistol down on the sill and opened the window.
“You know,” she said, “most people use the door.”
“Most people aren’t dead.”
She looked at him a moment longer.
Then she stepped back to let him in.
Her room was small and bare and very tidy.
A narrow iron bed, neatly made.
A washstand.
A desk under the window, piled high with files and papers and maps, lit by a green-shaded lamp.
A tin of clove cigarettes.
A half-empty bottle of cheap whisky and a single glass.
On the wall above the desk, pinned to the faded wallpaper, there were dozens of sheets of paper covered in her angular handwriting, connected to each other with lengths of red string.
Lucan saw his own name in the middle of them.
Lucan Marr.
With a red string running from it to a sheet that said Greaves & Son and another that said Varga — suicide??
and another that said Crane — WHERE?
She saw him looking.
“I like to see it all at once,” she said.
“Helps me think.” She poured whisky into the single glass and held it out to him.
When he shook his head, she drank it herself.
“Sit.”
There was only one chair.
He sat on the end of the bed.
She took the chair, turned it around and sat astride it, with her arms folded on the back and her brass hand gleaming in the lamplight.
“So,” she said.
“Mr.
Thorne.”
“Inspector.”
“You’ve climbed three storeys up a drainpipe in the middle of the night with your ribs broken.
I’m assuming you have something to tell me.”
“I have something to give you.” He took a folded sheet of paper out of his coat and held it out.
“And something to ask.”
She took it.
She unfolded it under the lamp and read it.
It was a copy, in Wren’s perfect forgery of Varga’s own handwriting, of the last pages of the barge ledger.
The list of payments.
Eleven years of them.
Every quarter, regular as clockwork, the same four names.
Seat VII.
Commissioner.
Registry, Deputy Master.
L.I.F.
Voss read it once.
Then she read it again.
Then she set it down very carefully on the desk and sat looking at it without speaking for a long time.
When she finally looked up, her face had changed.
All the dry humour had gone out of it.
She looked older.
Much older.
And very tired.
“Where did you get this?”
“From Varga.”
“Before or after he died?”
“Does it matter?”
She looked at him for a long moment.
Then she poured herself another whisky, drank it in one swallow and set the glass down hard.
“The Commissioner,” she said.
“Sir Rowland Asquith.
Head of the Crown Detective Bureau.
My superior’s superior.
The man who decides which cases get investigated and which files go missing.” She tapped the paper.
“Yes.”
“And Seat Seven.”
“I was hoping you’d know who that is.”
“Everybody knows who that is.” She laughed shortly, without humour.
“Seat Seven of the Chamber of Commerce.
Lord Ambrose Teague.
He chairs the committee that writes the amendments to the Bondage Statutes.
He wrote the amendment to Section Four.
The one that let them send your friends to Shaft Thirty.” She looked at Lucan.
“He’s also the man who’s protected Jebediah Gorse for the last nine years.”
“Madame Orlov said Gorse calls him the Seventh.”
“Madame Orlov,” Voss said, “should be very careful who she says that to.” She rubbed her face with her flesh hand.
“And L.I.F.
I don’t need to ask who that is.”
“No.”
“Lady Isolde Fennick.
Varga was paying the woman whose company he was stealing from.
Paying her, not hiding from her.” Voss frowned at the paper.
“Why would he do that?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“And this.” Her finger came down on the single large payment, eleven years ago.
The one with the word beside it.
Husband.
“That’s the year Lord Fennick died.
A riding accident.”
“Yes.”
They sat in silence.
Outside, a cab rattled by in the street below.
Somewhere a dog barked.
“I can’t use this,” Voss said at last.
Her voice was very quiet.
“You know that, don’t you?
I can’t take this to anyone.
Every single person I’d have to take it to is on this list, or works for someone who is.” She pushed the paper away.
“If I so much as show this to Penhallow, I’ll be found floating in the Grise with my pockets full of stones.
And you’ll be found right beside me.”
“I know.”
“Then why bring it to me?”
“Because you told me to,” Lucan said.
“In my shop.
You said you weren’t interested in the men who killed Varga.
You said you were interested in the people who built the machine Varga worked.
You said you couldn’t touch them.” He nodded at the paper.
“That’s who they are.
Now you know.
And now there are two of us who know.”
Voss looked at him for a long time.
“And what do you want in return?” she said.
“Mr.
Thorne?”
“Gorse.”
She went very still.
“I want to know about the dye-house behind Coldwater Mill,” Lucan said.
“I want to know how many guards he has, and when he moves the children, and who’ll come running if anyone tries to take them.
And I want to know whether you’ll come running too.”
The lamp hissed.
Voss’s brass fingers clicked once against the back of the chair.
“I had a brother,” she said.
Lucan waited.
“Arden.
He was nine.
Our father drank himself to death when I was fourteen and left us four hundred silver of debt, and they bonded us both.
They sent me to a laundry in Brassmarket.
They sent Arden to Coldwater.” She was looking at the paper on the desk, not at Lucan.
“I visited him every Sunday.
Through the fence.
He’d come to the fence and we’d talk, and I’d bring him bread when I had any.
Then one Sunday he wasn’t there.
The overseer said he’d been transferred.
To a mine.
They wouldn’t tell me which one.” Her voice didn’t change at all.
It stayed level and dry and quiet.
“Three years later, when I joined the Bureau, I went looking for the transfer records.
They’d been lost.
The man who signed them was Jebediah Gorse.”
She looked up at him.
“Arden was small for his age,” she said.
“Very thin.
He could fit through very narrow spaces.”
The room was silent.
“I’ve tried to touch Gorse eleven times,” Voss said.
“Eleven separate investigations.
Every single one of them closed.
Files lost, witnesses moved, Constables reassigned.” She lifted her brass hand and looked at it.
“I lost this to one of them.
The last time I got close.
An accident with a loom.
At Coldwater.
I was inspecting the turbines and a guard bumped into me.
It took them six hours to cut my hand out of the gears.”
She lowered the hand again.
“The children move on the first of the month,” she said.
“At night.
In a covered wagon, down the canal road to the Fennick Eastern Sidings, then by slag rail to the pithead at Shaft Thirty.
There are eight guards on the dye-house.
Gorse’s men, not Constables.
He keeps a mana-turbine running in the cellar under the dye-house all night, so the noise drowns out the crying.” Her voice didn’t waver.
“The nearest Constable post is on Grise Bridge, half a mile away.
If anyone so much as raises a voice at Coldwater, the sergeant on duty there has orders to send for Lord Teague’s private security before he sends for anyone else.”
“And you?”
“Me?” Voss smiled thinly.
“On the night of the first, I’ll be investigating a warehouse fire in Brassmarket.
A very complicated warehouse fire.
Very time-consuming.
I expect I’ll be there all night.” She lit a clove cigarette, striking the match on her brass thumb.
“And so will every Constable I can find an excuse to take with me.
Including the sergeant on Grise Bridge.”
Lucan looked at her.
“I can’t know,” she said quietly.
“You understand?
Whatever happens at Coldwater on the first.
I can’t know about it.
I can’t be involved.
I can’t be anywhere near it.
If I am, it all comes apart.
Everything.
Not just for me.”
“I understand.”
“And the children.” She held his eyes.
“Whatever happens to Gorse.
Whatever happens to his men.
You get those children out.
All of them.
Alive.
That’s the price.”
“That was always the point.”
She looked at him a long moment more.
Then she nodded once, short and hard, and looked away.
He should have left then.
His ribs ached and his body was tired and Rook was lying in the little room under the eaves of Greaves & Son with shadow creeping up his leg, and every hour mattered.
But he didn’t move.
And she didn’t ask him to.
They sat in the small bare room in the lamplight, among the papers and the red string, and neither of them said anything for a while.
She smoked.
He watched the smoke curl up toward the cracked ceiling and fade.
“The woman who came to the Bureau,” he said at last.
“With the statement.”
“Tamsin Marsh.” Voss blew out smoke.
“Tobin Marsh’s sister.
The night-watchman.
The one with the spike through his neck.” She looked at him sidelong.
“She’s very convincing.
Very calm.
Very sure.
She says she has proof.”
“What kind of proof?”
“She wouldn’t say.
She said she’d present it at the proper time.
She’s got a lawyer.
A good one.
A very expensive one, for a bonded seamstress.” Voss tapped ash into a saucer.
“She’s filed a petition with the Registry.
To have Lucan Aurel Thorne’s identity examined under oath.
The hearing’s in twelve days.”
Lucan said nothing.
“I’ll be called as a witness,” Voss said.
“As the officer investigating Pit Nine.
They’ll ask me if I have any evidence that Mr.
Thorne is in fact Mr.
Marr.” She was quiet for a moment.
“I’ll have to answer under oath.”
“What will you say?”
She turned on the chair and looked at him.
Really looked at him, for a long time, with her dark, steady, tired eyes.
Her face in the lamplight was all sharp angles and shadows.
There was a fine scar along her jaw he hadn’t noticed before.
“Is Lucan Marr alive?” she asked.
The question hung in the air between them.
He could lie.
He could tell her what he’d told her in the shop.
He’d become very good at lying in the last few weeks.
Wren had taught him.
The best lies are the truth arranged in the right order.
He thought about the forty-three bodies at the bottom of the chute.
The card she’d left on his counter.
They are all at the bottom.
The red string on her wall.
The little brother who’d come to the fence every Sunday until he didn’t.
“Lucan Marr died in Pit Nine,” he said.
“On the same night as Dez Harlow.
He was a bondsman who owed six hundred and twelve silver, and believed that if you could prove the numbers were wrong, someone would fix them.” He held her eyes.
“He’s gone.
He’s not coming back.
Whatever’s left is something else.”
Voss looked at him for a long, long time.
Then she nodded slowly.
“Good,” she said quietly.
“Then I’ve never met him.”
She stood up.
She went to the window and opened it, and the cold, sour night air came in, smelling of coal smoke and the river.
She stood beside it with her back to him, looking out at the dark rooftops.
“Go home, Mr.
Thorne,” she said.
“You look terrible.”
He stood.
He went to the window.
For a moment they were very close together, in the narrow space between the desk and the sill, close enough that he could smell the cloves on her and see the pulse beating in the side of her throat.
Neither of them moved.
“Inspector,” he said.
“Maren,” she said, without looking at him.
“If you’re going to keep climbing in my window in the middle of the night, you may as well call me Maren.”
“Maren.”
She turned her head.
Her face was very close to his.
Her dark eyes searched his face, as if she were trying to read something written there, very small, in a language she didn’t quite know.
“Get those children out,” she said softly.
Then she stepped back.
And the moment, whatever it had been, was gone.
He climbed out of the window and down the drainpipe into the dark.
When he reached the bottom and looked up, the lamp in her window had already gone out.
He got home an hour before dawn.
Rook was awake.
He was lying on his back in the narrow bed under the eaves, with the blanket pushed down, staring at the sloping ceiling.
His face was grey and sheened with sweat.
His leg was bare, and the black had reached halfway up his thigh.
It had stopped creeping like frost.
Now it moved in slow, sluggish pulses, like a heartbeat, and with every pulse it gained a little more ground.
Wren was asleep in the chair beside him with a book open on her lap.
Nell was asleep on the floor, curled up on a blanket, with one hand resting on the edge of Rook’s mattress.
“You look terrible,” Rook said hoarsely, as Lucan came in.
“So I’ve been told.”
“Did you get it?
What you went for?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” Rook closed his eyes.
He was quiet for so long that Lucan thought he’d gone back to sleep.
Then he spoke again, very softly, so as not to wake the others.
“Lucan.
When it gets near my heart.
If you can’t stop it.”
“Don’t.”
“I mean it.
I’ve seen men die of worse than this, back home.
Things from the deep water.
Things that crawl into you and eat you from the inside.” Rook opened his eyes and looked at him.
They were very dark and very clear.
“I’d rather you did it.
Not the shadow.
You.
Quickly.
With my own sword.
Will you do that?
Will you promise me that?”
Lucan looked at him for a long time.
“I promise,” he said.
“But it won’t come to that.”
Rook smiled faintly.
The gold tooth glinted.
“Liar,” he said.
“You’re getting better at it.”
He closed his eyes again.
[ Bound Servant ROOK — Shadow-bite progression: 24%.
Estimated time remaining: 10 to 14 days.
]
[ Rank 2 progress — 2 / 3 blood-debts.
Laundering requirement MET.
]
[ Days until the 1st of Thaw: 6.