‘Koldís …’ Stefán attempts the subject again.
‘She is no longer known by that name. She is called Clovis now. And she takes the name of her husband, as they do there. Fowler. Clovis Fowler.’
‘Ah. That is in our favour,’ he says. ‘They will search for Koldís Ingólfsdóttir.’
‘What do you mean?’ she turns to him. ‘Do you expect they would go all that distance to find my child?’
‘Yes, of course. Eventually.’
Elísabet is stunned, grasped by a new awareness that ripples through her and leaves her weak.
‘Leave me to think on this,’ she whispers.
Stefán brightens at this first hopeful sign that she may change her mind. ‘Of course. I’ll go now. Please let Margrét attend you. She is fond of you.’
He lingers at the door and turns to her again.
‘It is with great regret that we ask this of you. There is nothing we want more than to have you and your baby live here with us. I promise that we will devise a way to watch the situation carefully. It will be difficult to manage, Elísabet, but we will manage it.’
‘Am I to lose everything I love?’
Her lovely eyes seem to bore straight into him and he is taken unaware by the lump of emotion that lodges in this throat. He knows what it is to lose everything.
‘You will know your child one day,’ he promises.
Her face holds the kind of sorrow he has witnessed too often in his long life. Sometimes the others knock on his door in the dark hours when the nightmares come. It is not unusual to find one of them out walking before daylight in an effort to shake off their demons. They come to him begging for some kind of understanding of what they have endured. The anguish of losing his own wife and children has not provided him with any answers regarding the deep well of grief from which they are all forced to drink. So he listens to them, unable to offer much advice; as the years march on there are times he feels he may die from the exhaustion of it – if only he could.
When he looks to Elísabet for a small acknowledgment that she will co-operate, something changes in her. Her eyes grow wide with hope; her face transforms, and a wild, frantic woman looks back at him.
‘I could go as well! I would endure anything. Yes. I will.’ She is already planning the voyage. ‘Why did I not think of it? We could leave soon after the birth.’ Her whole being expands with hope.
‘We did discuss that possibility as a solution, but can’t you see? They will expect you to take that course. What they will never believe is that that you would part from your baby.’
‘What kind of mother would?’
‘A mother who wants to save her child from some unspeakable horror.’
The next morning when Margrét brings Elísabet’s breakfast bowl to the room, she lingers, hesitant, but clearly wanting to speak.
‘What is it Margrét?’
‘There is something the others have not been told. Something only Stefán knows. He chose not to alarm the others at the time, and I agreed with him. But you should know. I understand the decision facing you. I speak to you as a woman, but also as someone who has seen the unspeakable … evil … of the Falks.’ Margrét’s voice cracks a little as she loses composure.
‘Margrét, here sit beside me.’
‘No, please, do not be kind to me, I will not be able to speak.’
She reaches in her pocket for her handkerchief and mops her damp face.
‘My husband and I. We were blessed with a child very late in life. It was before … before we changed. Such a loving little girl, she made me ache with joy. She was with us the day we drank from the pool. I was going to give her a sip from my travelling cup, but the Watcher appeared. He frightened me so that I dropped the cup. He was kind. He told us to bring her back when she was older. Then he directed us to Stefán. But on the path, when we were almost a day’s ride from the pool …’ Margrét stops.
‘You do not have go on. It’s all right, Margrét.’
‘No! It is not all right!’ She lowers her voice. ‘The Falks. They rode it seemed out of the sky, suddenly four of them surrounded us. They said nothing. They asked no questions. And before we could get our bearings they took her.’
Elísabet gasps. Instinctively her hand clutches her belly.
‘The Falks were just guessing, we had seen them before, but they had no way of knowing if she had changed, or anything at all. My husband found her discarded body in the following spring’s thaw. He refused to let me see her. What they did to her body, the experiments, haunted him. My husband drank the contents of his phial a year later. Your child will not be safe here, Elísabet.’
Elísabet bows her head, her tears stream down and fall into her lap; tears shed for Margrét and for herself.
‘How old was your daughter?’
‘She was in her sixth year.’
LONDON
1831
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
‘Fuck. Fuck me into the light. I’m up to my knees in shit.’
Finn Fowler adjusts his lantern as he leads his crew on a race against the tide in a tunnel as black as midnight. He lowers the neckerchief that protects his nose and mouth from the noxious air.
‘Hold ’em up, hold ’em up. Don’t drop that fuckin’ cargo, you beasts.’
Sugar, tobacco, lace and chocolate, all they can carry of the stuff, is transported in a caravan of men who stretch the fabric of their dirty canvas trousers and troop under the streets. It becomes a simple run once they dupe their easy target – the lighterman who abandoned his goods for a draught of purl. Then, unpredictably, the current changes, along with the warning sound of the
