Blaze, p.11
Blaze, page 11
Grey sighed. His body would recover with enough food, but his soul required far more than that. He had just over a week at the most to find a mate, or his chance for immortality would be gone. Not just any girl would do. She would have to be pure, of age, and most importantly, willing. Of course, he had some skill in nurturing their decision, he thought with a smile.
It was a fine line between coercion and consent. He could bring them to the very edge, but the final choice had to be theirs. Only a willing soul could provide him the nourishment he needed.
During the Season there would have been a surfeit of women so desperate for a husband of good standing that he would have had the pick of the litter. He could have found a willing and wealthy wife.
That was always a welcome bonus; immortality wasn’t cheap. But he was in no position to wait for the cream to rise. He had to find someone, and promptly.
“Find me a bride,” he said. “And soon.”
“Yes, sir,” Bert said.
They turned to leave, but stopped as Grey cleared his throat.
He looked meaningfully down at the disemboweled body. The two fools looked at him stupidly.
“Dispose of … this.”
They hurriedly moved to clear away the body.
“And make sure you clean up the blood.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We’re not animals, after all.”
Artemis slathered strawberry jam on her toast. Her father was too engrossed in the morning paper to notice her indulgence, so she added a little more. Just as she was raising the toast to her mouth, he lowered the paper, frowning at her in mid-bite. A large glop of jam slid traitorously off the toast and landed on her plate with a plop.
It seemed he was about to chastise her when there was a knock at the door. Her father settled for a disapproving frown and waited for Mrs. Perry to answer it.
When she didn’t, he looked perturbed.
Artemis chewed as quickly as she could but felt compelled to answer his unspoken question.
Mouth still half-full, she said, “Mrs. Perry’s gone to market.”
Her father looked at her in mild rebuke.
She swallowed quickly, half-chewed toast scraping on the way down, and then wiped her mouth. “Sorry.”
He chuckled and shook his head as he got up to see who had come calling.
After he left the dining room, Artemis wiped up the blob of jam with her finger and slipped it into her mouth. Curiosity made her spin his discarded newspaper around to skim the headlines.
“City Suffers from Suffragettes”. Lord Spenlow expressed his dismay over the interruption to services and the loss of tranquility the recent spate of suffragette demonstrations had caused. “The folly of a few disrupts the many,” he said. “Outside agitators are surely to blame.” A not-so-subtle shot at Fiona McPhee, Artemis knew.
According to him, most English women did not even desire the vote, their responsibilities in the home being all-consuming. Not to mention that they had neither the mental nor physical capacity for such things.
Artemis grimaced. I’ll show him capacity. She went on reading. As much as her father disagreed with Lord Spenlow’s sentiments, and would have reacted much as she did, she was sure something else had been the cause of his distraction. It didn’t take her long to find the pair of stories that had almost certainly drawn his attention.
“Two More Missing In Spitalfields” and “Another Gruesome Find.”
She quickly skimmed the articles but had barely gotten halfway through when her father returned.
Without sitting down, he took a brief drink of coffee and picked up a piece of dry toast.
“I have to go see to Mrs. Hughes. She’s taken a turn for the worse. I don’t know when I’ll be back, but I’ve laid out a few books I’d like for you to study. We can discuss when I return. Please stay in today.”
Artemis nodded. More books. There had been two waiting in her room for her when she’d gotten back from Phoebe’s yesterday. To say Olalfski’s Grimoire and Compendium Maleficarum were not exactly the best bedtime reading was a gross understatement.
Her father looked at her meaningfully and she nodded.
“Books. Study. Right.”
He gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze as he passed and left her alone to finish breakfast.
As soon as she heard the door close, she went back to the paper. Two men were missing from Spitalfields and a third body, or what was left of it, had been found by the docks.
She grimaced at the graphic description. Disemboweled.
This had to be part of the rising evil her father had mentioned. People went missing all of the time, but this was different. While she couldn’t do anything to help the dead, she could help the living. That’s what the Blaze did, wasn’t it?
This is what her father had been training her for over the last few days. She knew she was getting better, but also understood that she had far to go before she could call herself a skilled fighter. There is more to being the Blaze than simply fighting, she told herself. She could go seek out important information; who was missing, where they were taken from, and why?
If she could answer those questions, she might find out who was behind it all. But where to start?
Spitalfields seemed the most logical place, though her father wouldn’t approve. He had been adamant that she not go poking around in things just yet.
But people are getting hurt, killed.
What was the point to being the Blaze if she couldn’t help them?
Besides, she wasn’t going off half-cocked. She’d come at this scientifically. Surely, he’d appreciate that.
Hypothesis: Someone bad is doing something very bad. All right, that needed work. She tried again: The rising evil is responsible for the murders and missing people. Better.
Now, all she had to do was prove it. That required data. Research. She couldn’t do the necessary research from here, ergo, going to Spitalfields was the only logical course of action.
“Voila!” she said with a grin. It was a perfectly sound rationale.
Even so, she knew her father wouldn’t feel the same way. Then he doesn’t need to know. Unless she found something helpful, and then he’d be too pleased with that to be put out. Probably.
In this case, it was undoubtedly easier to seek forgiveness than to get permission.
She finished her breakfast, tore the article out of the newspaper and stuffed it into her pocket. She found an old cloak she’d been meaning to give to the mission. It was a little moth-eaten and starting to fray at the edges. It would help her blend in; at least she hoped it would.
Putting it over her shoulders she eased the door open and slipped out, hurrying down the front steps.
“’Ello, miss!”
Tommy leapt from his perch on the driver’s bench of their carriage.
Darn it, she thought. Mrs. Hughes must have sent her own coach for her father to use.
“Where to?” Tommy said, reaching for the door handle.
For a moment, she thought about telling him the truth. It was quicker to take a carriage instead of walking to the train. But he was her father’s eyes and ears. That wouldn’t do.
“Just going for a walk,” she said. “Thank you.”
He tipped his cap and she walked on down the street.
She’d barely gone half a block when the hairs on the back of her neck stood up. Someone was watching her. She peered over her shoulder to see Tommy in the carriage, trailing her like a big black dog. He caught up to her moments later. She frowned up at him. “I told you, I’m just going for walk.”
Tommy nodded, pacing the horse slower to match her gait.
She cut in front of the carriage to cross the street, causing the horse to rear, but Tommy quickly regained control and continued to follow her.
When she’d gone another half block, she stopped and looked at him with exasperation. “What are you doing?”
“Keepin’ an eye on you for your father, like I told ya.”
“I don’t think he meant for you to stalk me.”
Tommy shrugged.
Artemis huffed in indignation. He wasn’t going to stop following her and, worse than that, he was sure to tell her father that she’d been out.
“All right, you win.” She went to reach for the door but Tommy jumped down and opened it for her. With a sigh, she stepped inside and sat down.
“Where to?”
“Spitalfields.”
“That’s not a place for an unaccompanied lady.”
“It’s a good thing I’m not unaccompanied then, isn’t it?”
He looked at her with confusion.
“I’m with you,” she snapped.
A grin of realization and then pride came to his face. He nodded. “Right. Spitalfields it is.”
Artemis leaned back and groaned. This was not going according to plan.
Every time Artemis had been to the East End the difference of just a few miles struck her to her core. Her father told her that conditions had improved here, although she failed to see how. As far as she could tell, the London she’d read about in Dickens still thrived. Beggars sat in doorways, ignored. Piles of garbage sat unremoved. Children in rags ran barefoot in the street. If this was an improvement, she couldn’t bear to imagine what it had been like before.
The carriage bumped its way through a rough patch in the street, jostling her from her thoughts. Tommy might be young, but so far, he had artfully wound their carriage through the many obstacles of the narrow and congested streets. Finally, he pulled up near a market on Commercial Street. Despite the lateness of the morning, the area still teemed with activity, just as she’d hoped.
Artemis opened her door and helped herself out of the carriage before Tommy could do so. He gave her a disappointed look but quickly schooled his features.
“Right,” she said, trying not to feel out of place. She dug into her pocket and pulled out the newspaper. Skimming it quickly, she found the name she was looking for. “Owen Norris.”
“Who’s that?” Tommy asked.
She held out the article. “The boy they found.”
Tommy took the paper uncomfortably, squinting down at it. His eyes darted over the page quickly, too quickly.
It took Artemis a painful moment to realize that he couldn’t read. Mortified that her thoughtlessness put him in such an awkward position, she moved to his side and pointed to the second paragraph, as though she thought he simply couldn’t find the important bit of information in the long thin columns of text.
“The body was identified as that of Owen Norris, late of Spitalfields,” she said, reading it for him, her finger tracing the words as she did. “He was murdered.”
Tommy looked at her in startlement and then his expression turned shrewd.
“What’s that to you?”
Artemis took back the paper and refolded it. “Are you going to help me or not?”
He slowly nodded, eying her warily.
“Stay here,” he said.
“I don’t take orders from you.”
“If you want a ride ’ome, you do.”
She raised her chin in challenge. “We’ll see what my father has to say about that.”
“I’d like to ’ear what ’e has to say about all this, too,” Tommy said with a grin.
She’d been outmaneuvered and she knew it.
“Besides, I don’t live far from ’ere. I know the area and the people. They’re more likely to talk to me than to you.”
Artemis crossed her arms over her chest, hating that he was right. “Fine.”
Tommy smiled; whether it was because he was happy to be useful, or happy to have bested her, she didn’t know.
“Be right back,” he said. “Don’t wander.”
He attached the hitch weight to the horse then walked down the street toward a group of cabbies.
“Don’t wander,” she said to herself, stewing. She’d wander if she wanted to wander. Just a little.
She slowly edged away from the carriage and toward the perimeter of the busy market. There were baskets, crates, boxes and bags filled with everything imaginable. There were sacks of potatoes nearly as tall as she was and each twice her weight.
“Oi!”
Startled, she turned to look behind her and saw a man with a pushcart laden with apples ready to spill from their bushels.
She smiled. He didn’t smile back.
“Move,” he said.
“What?”
“Get outta the bloody way.”
He began to push forward, and Artemis had to practically leap out of the way to keep from being run over. She bumped into a large woman who turned to glare at her, definitely not taking kindly to being jostled.
“Sorry,” Artemis said.
The surrounding crowd all stared at her, none looking too pleased. It seemed she was an outsider here as well.
Cautiously she moved away and returned to her spot by the carriage just as Tommy returned. The frown he wore as he approached told her he’d seen her leave.
“I thought I told you to wait by the carriage.”
“I never was good at waiting.”
He sighed and shook his head.
“Well?” she asked impatiently.
“I found ’im,” he said. “Well, not ’im, since, you know ….”
“What did you learn?” Artemis asked, nodding for him to get on with it.
“’Is father works over in a tannery in Bermondsey.” Tommy paused in thought. “One of my uncles was a tanner, you know. Uncle Leopold. Started working there when ’e was eleven. ’Ated the smell. Awful. So ’e cut off his nose so ’e wouldn’t have to smell the lot. ’Course, that didn’t work. Poor sod. Just left ’im with a big old ’ole in ’is face.”
Artemis wasn’t sure how to react to that little anecdote, but it didn’t matter because Tommy pressed on.
“Tied a thimble to a piece of string,” he said, “and wore it like an eyepatch, but for your nose like.”
Images of Uncle Leopold and his thimble for a nose formed unbidden in her mind.
“Said some ladies thought it was quite distinguished, actually.”
Artemis had so many questions about that statement she didn’t know where to begin but decided against pursuing any of them. Shaking her head to clear her mind, she said, “We should go to the tannery.”
Tommy shook his head. “’E ain’t there.”
Artemis’s eyes flashed in exasperation. “Then what was the point of all that?”
“If you find out where ’e ain’t, ya might find out where ’e is.”
“And did you?”
Tommy straightened proudly. “At the pub.”
“Of course he is.” It wasn’t even noon. All the stories she’d heard about the East End were undoubtedly true. It was soaked in beer and gin. She was about to ask why he hadn’t started with that information when Tommy added, “Mournin’ ’is boy.”
That brought her pique to a quick and sudden end. How quick she had been to judge and jump to the false conclusions. It was embarrassing and humbling, and she was grateful Tommy hadn’t heard her thoughts.
It was also a keen reminder of how serious this all was. Mourning his boy. This wasn’t one of her usual excursions; this was literally about life and death.
“Right,” she said, refocusing. “Do you know where it is? The pub?”
Tommy just grinned.
The Blind Beggar was on Mile End Road only a mile or so away.
When they got there, Tommy jumped down and poked his head in through the carriage window before she could get out.
“I think you should stay in the cab, miss.” He glanced around. “Lots of undesirables.”
Artemis forced a smile to her face. “Of course.”
Tommy looked pleased that she saw his wisdom. But he’d no more than taken a step away from the carriage when she opened the door and got out.
He looked at her with mild censure and consternation.
She breezed past him and he hurried to catch up.
“Miss,” he said, under his breath as she reached for the door. “You’re just a girl.”
No, I’m the Blaze, she thought, her mouth flattened into a thin line. This was her job, not his. She could handle herself. She opened the door and entered the pub.
Tommy moved quickly to her side, bumping into her in his haste. He snatched off his cap and mumbled his apologies. “At least,” he whispered, “let me do the talkin’?”
She glanced around. There weren’t many patrons and none seemed too happy at her arrival. Her bravado fizzled under the unwelcome heat of their gazes.
Maybe it would be better if he took the lead.
She nodded her assent, and he led her to the edge of the long bar where he wiped the crumbs off a stool for her.
Reluctantly she sat down as people continued to stare. Upper class, lower class, neither wanted anything to do with her.
The bartender finished wiping down a wet spot on the far end and made his way toward them. His eyes flicked to Artemis then to Tommy. For a moment, she thought he was going to tell her to leave, but instead he wiped his hands on the wet towel and spoke to Tommy.
“What’ll it be?”
“We just want some information,” Tommy said.
The bartender flipped the towel over his shoulder. “That’ll cost you a bob.”
Tommy gaped at him. “We could get four pints for that.”
Bartender shrugged indifferently. Tommy gestured to Artemis, who luckily always carried a little money with her. She dug a shilling out of her pocket and lay it on top of the bar.
The man gazed at the money. He lifted his chin toward Tommy as if Artemis didn’t exist. “What you want to know?”
“We’re looking for Leo Norris.”
The bartender’s baggy eyes narrowed. “What do you want with him?”
“We just want to talk,” Artemis said, earning a sidelong glance from the bartender.
“Tell him how sorry we are for his son. Buy him a drink,” Tommy added quickly.
That seemed to be what the bartender wanted to hear. He jerked his head in the direction of a table in the corner where a lone man sat leaning over a half-empty pint.
