Verity feels as if she has been slapped. But Constance is livid. It looks as if she goes to pat Clovis’s hand, and instead she grabs her wrist, pulling her arm under the table, digging her nails into her wrist until she draws blood.
‘You will take us to him,’ Constance says.
‘I will not. The men from Copenhagen … if they see us together …’ She jerks her wrist from Constance’s grasp. ‘They haven’t yet discovered where we live. If you and your sister haunt my home like a couple of old ghouls, you’ll bring attention to us. If you really have his best interests at heart and not your own selfish wishes, then you will leave us alone.’
‘We would never put him in harm’s way.’
Clovis takes a handkerchief from her purse and dabs her wrist, then tosses the lace-trimmed linen on the table and stands.
‘None of this matters.’ Clovis looks down at them. ‘He thinks you’re both dead.’
‘He … he what?’ Verity stammers.
Clovis backs away from them expressionless, a witness to the effect of her blistering words.
The sisters long to lurch at her but they are thwarted by the lie, as if their limbs are screwed to their seats. Not until the door of the Five Bells and Blade Bone closes and the daylight disappears once again do they rouse, and then in a swift panic they bolt out after her.
Verity curses that she must wear her dark glasses and is no help to Constance who looks left and right until she catches sight of a swinging, pleated skirt. She spots Clovis turning onto the Commercial Road. Clovis moves like a dart to its target, and when she rounds the corner to Salmon Lane the sisters moan with what they face.
Saturday’s commerce spills out into the great market street of the district. Clovis easily disappears into the densely packed throng. Assaulted by the stink of naphtha, the sisters quickly lose the woman’s heady scent. They dodge the hanging, newly killed rabbits. Pushing past buyers and sellers they ask, ‘Beautiful lady, dark green dress?’ But an organ and coronet warm up to earn their Saturday shillings, drowning their enquiries. The sisters jostle past several fried-fish bars, forging on to the end of the market until they reek of frying oil.
‘We’ve lost her,’ Constance says.
They reach the bottom of Salmon Lane and stop to rest in front of the turtle warehouse. Its window boasts signage for ‘the Real Turtle Soup’ and inside, the calipash and calipee await transport to the city restaurants.
Verity uses her pocket handkerchief to remove a film of grime from her glasses.
‘She’s a liar. Even if she has told Rafe we are dead, he won’t believe her. I know he won’t,’ she says.
‘It doesn’t matter. The important thing is that he’s somewhere in London. We should not have doubted. We will not give up this time, Verity.’
A sea turtle thumps its shell against the window. It claims its freedom from the boiling pot for a while longer.
Clovis turns off Salmon Lane into Copenhagen Place. Wondering if it is somehow possible to crush the Fitzgeralds, to silence them forever, she takes a dusty path that leads to the back of a timber-framed building. The door opens before she knocks.
‘I saw you through the window’ Mockett says.
He bolts the door as she sweeps in.
‘Your palace of science is a wreck,’ Clovis says.
Mockett ignores her comment. His workspace is normally immaculate when he isn’t creating a new product. She knows this.
She dips a finger into a concoction seeping through layers of muslin and sniffs.
‘Mint and lavender?’
Mockett nods.
He deals the legal drug: cosmetics. It is almost robbery. Face creams keep him and the Fowlers comfortable.
‘The mint is too strong.’
He nods again. She’s probably right, she has a good nose.
Mockett’s empire burgeons with a chain of chemist shops, but like the others, he cannot be acclaimed for his work. From his cavernous warehouse he doggedly protects his identity. There is no shortage of people with whom to do business; no one cares who he is as long as he produces and the profits soar. His medical, pharmaceutical, and science degrees, printed with pseudonyms, lie concealed in his desk drawer.
‘I thought we were meeting at the Five Bells,’ Rafe says to Clovis. ‘We’ve just begun.’
‘It’s no longer safe to be seen there. The publican is suspicious.’
‘Perhaps it’s time to make yourself scarce in Limehouse.’ Mockett suggests.
‘What about you? You still live here.’
‘I visit Wapping and Poplar. I never go to the Five Bells.’
Rafe sits in a dark corner, the laboratory section of Mockett’s workspace. Mockett taps Rafe’s vein. Another puncture, more blood. Tendrils of hair, nail-clippings, urine, a scraping of cuticles, and, did he remember to bring his semen, Mockett asks quietly. Clovis fastens her attention to the answer.
Rafe reaches into his trouser pocket. He’s past humiliation, but not anger. His tutor teaches him to paint with fingers tipped with fire. Your power as an artist is in your anger, he said. Rafe will be sad to leave him, as he must when his tutor’s sharp old eyes begin to notice.
‘Spit please, Rafe.’ Mockett holds a specimen jar to his lips.
Initially excited and challenged by Clovis’s wild quest to replicate Rafe’s fever sweat, row upon row of Rafe’s samples are a grim reminder of Mockett’s own arrogance. And now as he looks at the young man baring his arm, Mockett is awash with guilt for continuing useless experiments.
Rafe made his peace with Mockett one night when they were drunk as anything, both sick from a spit of ale. It was the night Mockett told Rafe what year he had stopped ageing. Painstaking record-keeping and monitoring of Rafe’s secretions, skin and blood, did actually account for something and revealed that Rafe’s body had not aged since 1867. They had guessed as much, but as science advances, it speaks clearer.
‘I’m thirty-five?’ Rafe had asked. ‘Why thirty-five?’
‘I have no fucking idea. It seems entirely random. Let’s get
