‘It’s true then,’ said Sadly. ‘You’re a churchman as well as a thieftaker.’
‘Unfortunately, the church does not permit parsons in the Circlist order to believe in gods.’ Daunt held up his hands. ‘Defrocked. They are sticklers in such matters. Abandoned, but still occasionally useful to the inquisition. Perhaps that makes both of us little people.’
‘Not you, says I,’ Sadly insisted, his voice lowering in awe. ‘Your name’s whispered in fear among the bad sorts back in the city. When Jethro Daunt is engaged, the villain of the piece had better scarper for the hills, for if they don’t, they’ll end up dangling in the noose outside Bonegate jail. Don’t even think of nobbling him, or that metal ogre of his will drop you off a building with your skull crushed in.’
Daunt ran a finger across the contour lines of the chart. Feared by the underworld, abandoned by the church. Is this what my life has come to? The increasingly faint stimulation of pitting his wits against the most vicious and devious masterminds in the slums of Middlesteel. Crime spread like algae in the stagnant pools of the poor. As soon as one case was solved, there was always another. Their clients, mostly the outraged rich who could afford to pay Daunt and Boxiron’s bills; commercial lords affronted by the down and desperates’ efforts to relieve the rich of some of their wealth. Was it any wonder that Boxiron was growing suicidal with his life, crippled and crammed inside his malfunctioning frame? Any wonder the steamman felt that way when even Daunt — hale and healthy — worried that they chased ever-greater risks in the cases they accepted, just to feel the tingle of being alive. To distract them both from the truth: that for neither of them, was this the appropriate channel their short time in the world had been destined to flow down. What would Daunt’s father have thought of him now, if his bones hadn’t been long buried? His father had been disappointed enough that his son had turned his talents and intelligence towards the seminary, rather than following him into the law. But the life of an articled clerk in the middle court, even rising to be a judge — his father’s dream, never his — had held little appeal. No, it never did to dwell on the might-have-beens. If Jethro Daunt had been stuck in his father’s dusty office, stamping legal summons and reviewing court proceedings, then he would never have been able to rescue Boxiron from his previous life as an enforcer for the lords of the underworld. How many murderers would’ve gone free to kill more innocents?
And if I weren’t here, who would minister to Damson Shades? Certainly not the drunken sop who passed for a surgeon on the Purity Queen. Dose her up with laudanum and reach for the bone saw to carve off a mangled limb. Such methods won’t keep the poor girl alive. To doubt is human, but I need a clear mind and a focused soul if I’m to get to the heart of this matter. I fear the blood of many thousands will be on my hands, should I fail.
Daunt was reaching for the comforting round sphere of a Bunter and Benger’s aniseed drop when the commodore entered the room. ‘With me, lad! The girl’s fever has taken a turn for the worst!’
The commodore stepped out of the way while Daunt felt Charlotte Shades’ forehead and then took her pulse. Her skin was soaked with sweat while her possessed ramblings had dropped away to a faint murmur. ‘Her fever is not getting worse, Jared. Quite the contrary, it is breaking. She is on the mend.’
‘Are you sure, lad?’ He allowed himself a burst of relief.
The consulting detective nodded. ‘I know my previous occupation concerned itself with the state of my parishioners’ minds and souls first and foremost, but the third component of the natural trinity is the body. And I’m happy to say that young Charlotte Shades’ flesh is returning to balance.’
Seeing Charlotte stretched out on the cot in front of him put Jared Black in mind of another woman, another time. The commodore sighed. One of the strange things about surviving long enough to see your own death swimming up in the water towards you was that the events of your early life often seemed more real and immediate than the occurrences that had happened just the day before. Maybe the brain preferred to remember the body as it had been, hale and fit and with a whole life of possibilities stretched out in front of it, denuded of disappointments. Not crumbling, a casual victim of entropy — eroded by the natural course of life and its sicknesses. Ah, it’s a tricksy thing, a man’s mind. There had been many women, of course, wives who had died and borne him children, but the first love was always the fondest remembered. Maeva, are you still alive? Still out here with the nomads of the sea? He had been in love with her from the first moment he had seen her. And who wouldn’t be? So full of fire. Calling you in like a moth to her light. What he’d felt for Maeva wasn’t just a function of the fact that she had saved his life. Pulling him from the wreckage of a broken u-boat like a fisherman levered winkles from the rocks of the shoreline. There were tales of mermaids who did that, who rescued drowning submariners, but Maeva had been entirely human. And like all the finest women, she had made him feel more human too. After the royalist-in-exiles’ hidden island base had finally been located and destroyed by parliament, Maeva had given Jared Black the thing he had needed most: a reason to go on living.
Was our first meeting so many years ago? It feels like yesterday. There had been a blackness in the wrecked conning tower, the kind of complete, utter blackness that could only come from the sea flooding in and even the flicker of light from the instrument panels sparking out as her power drained. Legs trapped under a collapsed hull plate, he had watched as a bobbing fairy light in front of him had grown to the glow of a diving helmet’s face plate, looked on Maeva’s ethereal porcelain beauty, snowy-white like only a life lived under the sea could make a woman. How old was I, twenty, twenty-one? My first command shot out from underneath me. Everyone else, my friends and family in the crew, a corpse.
She had prodded him, checking he was as dead as all the other u-boat privateers, drawing back as she saw his mouth grimace in pain. Connecting her suit to his with a communication line. ‘You’re a u-boat pirate, I presume? Not a captive held for ransom by the marauders.’
‘Privateer, lass, never a pirate. Licensed to take back what’s ours by right. And you, I presume, must be one of those murderous underwater savages that roam the oceans, a seanore.’
‘I understand that the self-proclaimed nobles who wrote your dubious licenses of brigandage are much like this vessel, now. Dead in the water.’
‘So then, news travels fast.’
‘There are probably clans on the other side of the world who were woken by the sounds of the depth charges striking your u-boat pens.’
‘War’s a right noisy business. Not much quietness in it.’ He’d watched her pick up her lance. ‘Make it quick for me, lass, before you strip my boat.’
She’d jabbed him, experimentally in the chest. ‘You’re a very unsuccessful pirate. Not a single chest of treasure I can find on board.’
‘Privateer, please. And I was a more successful rebel than I ever was a liberator of cargoes.’
‘Not very clever, either. Silks and spices always have a market. Causes are cheap. Almost everyone can invent one for free.’
‘I’d thank you kindly to murder me before the lecture, rather than after.’
She raised the lance, but rather than spearing him with the deadly crystal blade, she had pushed it under the hull plate trapping his legs and begun to lever it up. ‘The price on your head makes you the most valuable thing in this wreck, surface-dweller.’
‘Too valuable to sell, if the truth be told.’
‘You’re every bit as arrogant as your people are said to be. Why would I want to keep a filthy surface- dwelling rascal around?’
‘So I can look at you, lass. So I can just look at you.’
How many years did we have together? No more than two, as I remember it. Jared Black felt a brief stab of pain. He’d vowed to Maeva he would never leave her. He had vowed to himself that he would never flee from parliament again. But when he had been recognized by a trader, sold out to parliament’s agents for the price on his rebellious head, then he had abandoned her. For how could he bear to witness what had befallen his family and comrades-in-arms happen a second time to the simple nomads of the sea? Bombed and ruthlessly hunted for harbouring a notorious royalist captain? No, that was never going to happen. The commodore had cut and run from their gloriously uncomplicated existence together. He had run and he had kept on running, and perhaps he had never really stopped. Changing identities like other men changed overcoats. There were many prices that fate demanded of a man. None so painful as a life he had never had a chance to live.
The hammock Charlotte Shades was lying in rocked as the Purity Queen’s hull shifted, bringing the commodore back to the present with a jolt as the floor’s angle shifted to an incline then jarringly righted itself.
‘We’ve surfaced,’ said the commodore. ‘Time to signal the ships out there we’ve a mind to join their convoy.’
‘A mind for one last voyage, Jared?’
‘What’s that, lad?’
