“And is that a… Mud Lark?” ventured the young man.
McKee stared across at him. “This is a linnet. Who are you?”
“My name’s Tilling, ma’am, Arnold—”
“Excellent. I’m Lady Wishfort and this is Mr. Petulant.” Crawford recognized the names as characters from Congreve’s play The Way of the World, but he was embarrassed that she had chosen the names of villains.
“Actually,” he said hastily, “my name is”—he couldn’t remember the first name of the play’s hero—“is Mr. Mirabell.” He added, “And this is Lady Millamant,” giving McKee the name of the heroine.
But this wasn’t a time for nonsense. He cleared his throat and looked across at McKee. “You said they might … sense what we are? Er … what are we?”
The windows were in shadow for a few seconds, and the knocking and rattling of the coach was louder, and Crawford realized that they were passing under the Temple Bar arch.
McKee seemed to relax. “Were you too drunk to remember that thing you saved us from, on Waterloo Bridge seven years ago? It was … angry seems too pale a word, too human … about our relations with members of its family. Well, jealous, in your case. Girard presumably loved you.”
Crawford winced. In spite of himself, he was remembering things his parents had told him. “My mother and father,” he said hesitantly, “were kin by marriage, or said they were, to…” He laughed uneasily. “Well, they said it was to a species of vampire, actually. I don’t think—”
“That would have been before about 1820?”
He nodded, feeling nauseated again with the smell and motion of the carriage. He was peripherally aware of Arnold Tilling’s stare.
“That’s likely why the creature found your family,” said McKee. “The vampires were gone for about thirty years, and then about fifteen years ago somebody must have invited one back and blooded it.” She gave him an appraising look. “You probably resemble your parents in some way these things sense and remember, like the smell of your soul or something.”
What she was saying fit in with things he recalled his parents saying, and in spite of her outlandish statements, Crawford heard the quiet assurance of sincerity in her voice, and he gave a sigh that seemed to deflate him. He was looking away from her at the bird as he asked her, “And they hate us?”
Arnold Tilling apparently took him to be addressing the bird, for he raised his eyebrows and stared with some evident anxiety at the little cage.
McKee said, “They hate us because the ones they adopt loved us — if only in a brief, token way sometimes! They see the ones they adopt as having been part of our families, and these things don’t want them to be part of any family but their own. So they kill as many members of the plain human family as they can reach. You and I added to their burdens, with Johanna.” She laughed bleakly. “It would powerfully inconvenience them, Mr. Mirabell, if you and I were to marry and have lots more children.”
Crawford could feel his face stiffen, and he kept his eyes on the caged bird.
“Not,” added McKee after a pause, “of course, that you’d ever consider marrying a onetime prostitute.” Crawford heard her shift on the seat, and then she went on brightly, “Have your wife and the other son come back, ever, since their deaths? Have you seen them again? It would be at night.”
“No,” whispered Crawford.
“Well, they did die on the river, after all, so their ghosts are probably safe in the common crowd that infests the water. Mr. Tilling, you remember how bad the river smelled four years ago? The Great Stink?”
Crawford, still staring at the bird, felt the young man beside him nod jerkily.
“A saturation of ghosts, that was. More the result of cholera than the cause of it! They seem to decay in an organic way, you see, and if the concentration of them is high enough—”
Arnold Tilling lunged half out of his seat and yanked on the cord that rang the bell beside the driver. “I’ve only just,” he babbled, “only just remembered!” He was already gripping the inner door handle as the coach rocked and slowed. “I need to — business at…”—he crouched to peer out the grimy window—“at the Old Bailey this morning. It’s been lovely spending time with—”
Then he had got the door open and was already leaning out over the pavement. Cold river-scented air whisked through the coach.
A front wheel grated against the curb, and Tilling evidently decided that the vehicle had slowed enough for jumping.
When he was gone — perhaps falling, from the clattering sound of it — McKee gripped the door lintel and leaned out, squinting up toward the driver. “Carry on!” she called, and the coach wobbled and lurched forward again.
“Did he,” Crawford asked when she had pulled the door closed and sat down again, “break his leg?”
“Why, do you treat humans too?”
“Never. God looks after them, or claims to.”
“Ultimately, I suppose. Are you and God — at odds?”
“Yes.”
They stared at each other for several seconds, and then Crawford said, “Have you seen your daughter—”
“Our daughter.”
“Our daughter, since her death?”
McKee opened her mouth — then closed it and shook her head, scowling. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have got — it was unreasonable of me to get angry. I’m glad your wife and younger son are apparently resting in peace. No, I haven’t seen Johanna, since. Most people just die, and stay dead.”
Crawford nodded several times and looked out the window at the Romanesque spire of St. Bride’s. He had to remind himself that all this distressing business really might be true. He had seen what he’d seen, done what he’d done.
“Why have you caught their attentions?” he asked. “I suppose I can see now why the — the thing on the bridge recognized me, but why did it recognize you?”
“Oh, why do you suppose?” He was surprised to see a glint of tears in her eyes a moment before she angrily cuffed them away.
“Girls in that trade,” she went on, “may sometimes unknowingly have congress with adopted human members of that terrible family. Even a … brief connection of that sort looks like trespass to those creatures, suffices to rouse their jealousy.” Crawford glanced at her, but she was avoiding his eyes. “A month or so before you and I … met,” she said, “there was a young man, at an accommodation house in Mayfair. Afterward, he seemed ill at ease, more than the ordinary, and he urged me to enroll at the Magdalen Penitentiary in Highgate; he said the priests and sisters there could help me undo bad connections I’d made. I thought he was just another guilty Christian trying to salve his conscience after the fact, after the act … until I walked outside again.”
She shivered. “Right away, as soon as I was out under the night sky again, there was … webs in the air, and a smell like rainy streets, or broken stone, very strong. Old Carpace had made sure all the girls knew what to do when that happened, and she always made us wear some metal on our shoe soles at night — sometimes pattens, otherwise anything wired on — holed coins, spoons, eyeglasses.”
“Really. And what were you—” Crawford began, but the caged bird began chirping rapidly, and McKee pulled a tiny cloth bag from a pocket in her coat, dug a pinch of what appeared to be white sand from it and sprinkled it through the cage bars onto the bird’s tail.