borders remained the smallest in size, with the Baker’s territory reaching as far south as the Isle of Dogs, the former retained a grip upon London’s premier pleasure garden, and the firmest grip of all upon the Chinese opium trade.
Truly, if the Midnight Menagerie demanded Coventry’s skin, the Veil could see to it easily. That was not the way, however. Such bounties were left to collectors, such as I, and I could not—and would not—count upon the Veil’s aid in securing a quarry.
If I intended to secure Coventry for the purse, I would need to do so before he reached Baker ground. It would be safer for all involved that way.
I knew that he must leave here some time soon, and I had made plans to follow and seize any opportunity along the dark roads. If he reached the edge of Baker territory, well before Brick Street, I’d lose my chance of a quiet collection and be forced to negotiate—if even given the opportunity, for the Bakers were not a forgiving sort—with any other men within earshot of a whistle.
If I were lucky, Ishmael Communion would be among them—a friend, as they go, and an extremely large tool of persuasion.
If I were unlucky, I would be forced to run.
Any worse than that, and I’d be a dead collector washed up along the River Thames a few days hence.
Easily decided, and all the better when I’d followed Coventry’s trail to this den. I only had to encourage the large fellow to smoke as much as his bellows of a chest could imbibe, and he would be docile as a kitten.
Such efforts were a necessity. I was confident, as collectors routinely must be, yet I was not so far gone that I imagined myself capable of taking on the large Coventry without the help of the calming pipe. In the fickle haze of the Chinese smoke, the great weight of the man mirrored that of a mountain—unmovable but for his own volition. Although I had no intimate understanding of Coventry’s talents, I had no doubt that he would fight like a maddened bull were he antagonized far enough.
A body such as his did not join the Bakers to become a beggar. He lacked overt injury, so would not be much of an abram, and carried no sign of sailor’s cant to play the part of a ruffler. That left thieving or bruising, and I had a clear enough picture of which direction our Mr. Coventry leaned. I was not eager to test his prowess with fists or cudgel.
I preferred, if at all possible, a peaceful collection tonight.
He had not yet denied my pass of the pipe, and I wagered a man large as him could go for a few more before I trusted my weight against his. I fit my mouth about the narrow tube and inhaled the smoke gathered within its bulbous end. I did not fear the sharing of such pipes, for the smoke within did much to ease such idle concerns. The smoke burned in a delightful reminder of its nature—warmth and continued lassitude slid over my senses like sweet bliss.
Would that it could ease the darkest of my fevers; I was too far gone in its use to allow it to take such liberties.
The tar popped faintly in the gleaming dish, and as I maintained my held breath, I passed the slender pipe to my left.
No grunt of thanks came. No thickly callused and peeling fingers over mine.
I turned my head, every gesture given a deliberation of pace and measure that my senses delighted in. The air caressed my grimy cheek, as sweet as a stroke from a gentle hand, and I smiled vaguely as if I were only ascertaining Coventry’s appearance for that of a real man, and not a mirage.
There was no mountain to look back at me.
The pipe slipped from my fingers.
I blinked when the cylindrical tube clattered and clinked to the shoddy floor, each marked note a shimmering crystal bell in my hearing. My eyebrows drew together as I stared at the smudged brass. There was no hand to take it from me, no gruff rumble of acceptance as he’d given me half a dozen times before. I waited a tick more, as if he would reappear from nowhere at all.
He did not do this, either.
For a man whose every breath heaved like a mountain, he had moved like a ghost from his place on the floor. I could only scowl at the cushions emptied of both ghost and mountain.
The skiff had gone. Not only had he
By all the bleeding bells in Westminster Abbey, I’d lost my quarry.
How? I would have sworn he was right beside me. Not a minute ago, he’d passed me that pipe without so much as an inquiring lift of eyebrows.
Wasn’t it but a minute?
I fumbled underneath my too-large coat, plucked the small, tarnished brass pocket watch from its place inside a pocket hidden on the outside of my slatted armor corset. I checked the time as cautiously, furtively as I dared. It told me nothing, for I had forgotten to wind it.
Careless of me.
Secreting the small piece once more about my person, I clambered to my feet, swaying as the ground tipped beneath me. A hand not mine caught my backside—less a fondle than an idle motion of helpful restraint— and I righted myself immediately. “’Fanks,” I tossed off, in the vernacular of the truly uneducated. Exactly the sort of thing one might expect from a guttersnipe’s vocabulary.
“Yeh,” said the man who’d righted me, waving me away as if not quite sure if what he saw was real or imagined. “Yeh, sure. Nice night for’t.”
Ask him tomorrow what I’d looked like, and he’d like as not make it up as he went. Opium could be as much help as hindrance.
For my needs, it was all help. Ordinarily, anyhow. Tonight, I had miscalculated.
Amidst the grumbles of sprawling patrons astride every chair, settee, cushion and even the bare floor, I made my way from corner to corner, searching for a large man with the big black beard of a storybook pirate.
“Watch it!”
“Pass that dream, lad,” someone else mumbled.
I took the pipe from one outstretched hand, tucked it into the asker’s, and moved along.
Nothing. Not so much as a whisker of Coventry’s presence. He’d vanished.
And with him, any hope of a hefty bounty to weigh against my own debts.
“Brilliant,” I muttered, whirling. No real interest met my searching gaze; I was but another patron of this ever so fine establishment, another fool of indeterminate age to give hard-won coin to the same criminal Chinese organization that held my leash.
For I too owed the Karakash Veil a debt of life.
Telling enough that no matter how hard I worked now, I was not carving a dent in the weight of the owing.
Especially as I kept losing my targets.
I spun for the door, pushed away the pipe thrust at me and hurried to catch the trail of the vanishing mountain.
A dim hope, even I knew that. The fog that filled the streets of London was blindingly thick, laced in black coal and yellow filth, painted in eerie shades by the gaslamps struggling to pierce the gloom. So terrible had the coal-smoke castoffs of the factories gotten that Parliament decades ago decreed that all the most respectable parts of London were to be raised above on massive hydraulic lifts.
The work was done long before my day, providing a neat divide between Society’s disposition and those unable to keep up the appearances. Immigrants—such as the Chinese teeming in London’s Limehouse district—and the colored Negros freed by Parliament’s abolition of slavery remained tucked safely out of view, beside the factories, the working class and the poverty-stricken. Those who could manage to keep up such appearances, or them what could learn enough deportment to work for a fine lord, were lent an accord.
There were trades that offered a certain amount of respectability, and then there was real work, done by scarred men and women whose livelihood rested on the pittance earned. My father had been among the former, a doctor of some repute, before he suffered an ill-conceived break with sanity that resulted in the death of my well- to-do mother and my subsequent orphaning. After a childhood saturated in Godfrey’s cordial—a trick of laudanum
