The men who searched for us below, however, did not give up so easily.
“Why are they searching so steadily?” Maddie Ruth asked as we paused to let her adjust her burden. Red-cheeked and now soot-smeared, she looked as much a fright as I expected I did. At least she was no longer so out of place, what with her higher standards of cleanliness than the streets often demanded. I’d helped her tuck up her skirt, baring a sight more woolen stocking than I expect she cared for.
Better that than tripping on the hem and regretting the lack of foresight during the tumble to a broken head.
I shook my head. I had no answer for her. I could see no benefit to be so focused on two flighty birds with no apparent value to them. I leaned over the ledge we crouched beside, coughing harshly to dispel the gummy taste of the smokestacks we passed by from my throat.
I couldn’t see the streets below, not as such, but I could still hear the echoed remains of hue and cries, lifted from one side of the district to the other.
“It makes no apparent sense,” I muttered.
“Maybe they’re after you?”
“If they are,” I said, not one to let a lesson slide, “then ’tis because I am a collector and they see an advantage to it.”
“Or they know you’re a girl.”
“You’re the twist here,” I pointed out, glancing at her skirt with deliberately pointed interest. “My sex is not so apparent to them what don’t know how to look.”
Maddie Ruth frowned, but said nothing.
Good. I hoped she thought about that.
I braced my fingertips against the ledge, wincing when the act sent sharp tingling across my injured hand. I muttered a few choice words. I should have asked to borrow Maddie Ruth’s gloves. She still carried them, tucked into the back of her belt.
“I thought you would have fought them off,” she said, her voice quiet and a little small. “They’re not supposed to bother collectors.”
“And who told you that?” Turning away from the long drop beside me, I hopped over a loose shingle and beckoned. “Come on, then, we’re not free yet.”
She rose from her crouch, wincing. The weight of her launched netting device was likely becoming less insignificant by the minute. “It’s the rule, right? We all know collectors’re to be left alone.”
“Is that so?” My voice was as dry as the Arabian sands, and slightly amused as I navigated us across the less steep rooftop of what I suspected was a pub, or some like communal gathering. The smell of roasting meat—plain, without spice, and likely flavored with rat or stray dog—merged with the thick pong of the typical London low barrage of odorous delights. Over it all, a fishy rot, wafting from the River Thames just south. “Pray tell who this everyone is so that I may commission them to make a sign.”
“But they all say it.”
Maddie Ruth was of an age where the truths of her knowledge had not quite come to terms with the realities of living. I had very little patience for it, though I admit that in her I saw some of my own arrogance. Difficult to avoid it. A young girl seeking to become a collector, a man’s profession at the very least and an unforgiving one at the worst.
I’d learned quite a bit on my first official bounty, and subsequent collections had only refined me. That I was alive still was not entirely a matter of skill.
“Use your eyes, girl,” I told her, grasping a ledge and leveraging myself over the top. My hands ached with the effort. “Does it appear as if the Black Fish Ferryman give a toss what your they suggests?”
She was quiet for a long moment, following behind me with slightly more racket in every footstep. Creaking leather, shuffling boots and the occasional loud breath as she pushed herself harder than I expect she thought she might have to.
Was I ever this naïve?
I had to think so. No wonder Hawke’s first inclination had been to dismiss me, those five long years ago.
We walked in silence for some few minutes, my gaze sharp on the shrouded rooftops around us just in case the Ferrymen had roped a bantling into playing the spy for them. Then, thoughtfully, I asked, “Why are you with the Menagerie, Maddie Ruth?”
I could all but hear her shoulders move, emphasized by the squeak of still-stiff leather. “The work is steady.”
“What work?”
“I keep the clockwork running, make sure all the circus mechanisms are in good order, and when there’s the occasional tumble from the high places, I know enough common medicine to help.” She listed them off as if she were highlighting her own references, and I bit off a smile before I succumbed to it. “Beside all that,” she added, “Mr. Hawke took my pa in when no one else was willing. Seemed only right to stay when pa finally died of his ague.”
A sobering thought. On the one hand, that the Veil allowed a stray girl and her sick father to stay painted a rather optimistic picture of the faceless voice threatening to turn me over to the flesh tables. On the other, Maddie Ruth had no apparent family to keep her off them.
“What took your pa?” I asked her.
“The bliss.”
Not an uncommon issue, for them who did not handle the opium well. I said nothing to that, and heard no warning. As I said: arrogance.
I meant to ask if she was treated well—and heaven help me if she’d said no, for I had no plans in place to remedy that—when a cacophony of shouting erupted somewhere below.
I shushed her with a hiss, hurrying across the narrow tenement casing. Nimble, keeping my body ducked low, I leapt the small divide and left her to make her way over at a slower pace as I dropped to my stomach and crawled to the far edge.
What I saw in the thinner fog almost forced me to laugh out loud; a shift of amusement that abruptly turned grim as Maddie Ruth fell to her knees beside me.
“What is it?”
“A puzzle,” I said, not truly an answer, but I hadn’t worked it out yet, myself.
Men brawled in the street below, large and small, thin and wide. Black skin, pale skin, young and old. I saw perhaps half a dozen faces I wasn’t certain I recognized, and a little over a dozen more fighting them. I watched a large man pin down a lanky youth and drive a fist like a brick into his jaw, delivering a facer that would crunch bone. Two more chased a squat man whose bare-armed tattoos were already abraded and bleeding—likely a tumble to the rough cobbles.
There was no charm, no grace to the event. This was no gentlemen’s game of fisticuffs. Them what would stagger away would do so bleeding.
The hollering I’d heard came not just from this scrap in the middle of the street—empty, I suddenly realized, with carts left abandoned and doors closed along the way—but from the surrounding lanes and crossroads.
We’d stumbled upon a patch brawl. But why on earth was I looking at Brick Street Bakers in Ratcliffe?
More, if they were here, where was Ishmael Communion? I found it impossible to imagine the Bakers would move into another district so openly without Ishmael’s knowing. The man was not only a prominent member of the crew, but he was built like one of the Queen’s own warships—large, bulky and packing a fierce wallop.
The fact that he was among the finest rum dubbers of the black art—that is, a master lockpick, whose skill could be considered an art—often made him a useful ally.
I regarded the man as a friend. If he was here, he could help me smuggle my unwelcome companion out of this nonsense.
“Let us go,” I whispered, and rolled from sight.
The trouble with Cat’s Crossing—once one eased past the difficult footing, the often treacherous upkeep and the likelihood of carriers to report on one’s movements—was the getting down. To the unwary, reaching the street below was often a matter of misplaced footing.