“But you don’t need my help,” I said. My tone was a little flat; something in what he’d said pressed on my spirits. I could feel doors slamming in my mind.
“Well, here’s the thing. We do.” Lockwood leaned forward, and I noticed a scar on the side of his neck—not large, but white and raised—one I’d never seen before. “You’re right, Lockwood and Co.’s been doing pretty nicely these last few months, well enough to be selective about our clients. We’ve had some interesting ones, like the blind dressmaker who saw ghosts imprinted on her own private darkness, but our latest is in a category of her own. You know her. It’s Penelope Fittes.”
Hold up. That took me by surprise as well. Penelope Fittes was chairperson of the oldest, largest, and most celebrated of all psychic detection organizations, the great Fittes Agency. Along with the head of Rotwell’s, and several of the iron and salt magnates, she was one of the most powerful people in the country. I blinked at him. “Er, doesn’t she have an agency of her own? Rather a big one, in fact.”
“Yes, but she’s taken a shine to us,” Lockwood said. “She’s liked us ever since the Screaming Staircase affair. And after we saved her from assassination at the carnival last autumn, she’s made it her business to monitor our progress and send the odd job our way. Well, she’s got a new case for us, quite a big one, and the thing is, by all accounts it needs a good Listener.”
I looked at him.
“A very good Listener.”
I said nothing.
Lockwood shifted in his seat. “So…I wondered if you could help us out, just this once, in a freelance capacity….You are the best, after all.”
Time snapped back into one piece; I was wholly in the present, alert and questioning.
“What’s the case?”
“I don’t know.”
I frowned. “Don’t you think you ought to find out before dragging me into it?”
“It’s difficult and dangerous, that’s all I’ve been told. But Penelope Fittes is intending to brief us—by ‘us’ I obviously mean me, George, and Holly, but you could join, too, if you were up for it—tomorrow morning at Fittes House. You know how much of a recluse Ms. Fittes is, particularly after that carnival thing. It must be something special if she’s personally involved.”
“I still don’t get it. Why does she want you to do this job? She’s got a million agents of her own.”
“Again…I don’t know, Luce. But if we do it well, it’ll stand us in good stead for further commissions.”
“I’m sure it will, and that’s great for you, but I’m no longer part of Lockwood and Co., am I?”
“No. I’m well aware of that. But you happily work with other agencies, don’t you?”
“Yes, you know I do, but—”
“What’s the difference?”
“Don’t pressure me, Lockwood. You know it’s not the same.”
I got up abruptly, grabbed the damp towel, and tossed it over the ghost-jar, blocking the face from view. Its contortions had been growing ever more frantic; they’d disturbed me even out of the corner of my eye, and I couldn’t put up with it any longer.
I threw myself back onto the bed, glowering. “What were we saying?”
“I’m not trying to pressure you, Luce,” Lockwood said. “I realize it’s odd, me just showing up, but if you’re worried about risk, the chances of anything going wrong are very small. Almost nonexistent. Maybe you had a wobble a few months ago, but personally I believe you’ve always had your Talent under excellent control. I don’t think there’s the slightest chance of you endangering us. You always were too strong for that. Sure, for whatever reason, you no longer want to be a full part of our team. It became a burden for you, one that could no longer be borne. That meant you had to leave us in a hurry, which was difficult for you, I know, just as it was for us. We all had to pick up the pieces. I’m not going to pretend that Lockwood and Co. found it easy after you left….George was pretty upset about it.” He looked down at his hands. “Anyway, I’ve no doubt those feelings of yours still remain. Teaming up for a night would be weird for all of us, but most of all for you. But I do think you could be strong enough to ignore the weirdness, Luce, if you thought it was the right thing to do. One night’s work, Luce…it’s almost nothing. Just helping us out. Who knows, it might make us all feel a bit better about things, I don’t know.”
He flicked a glance up at me—it was sad and hopeful all at once, a glance that presumed nothing—then gently lowered his gaze and went back to contemplating his hands. He’d made his pitch; there wasn’t much else he could say. I was looking at my own hands, frowning at the scrapes on the knuckles, the faint magnesium staining on the fingers, the dirty flecks of iron and salt crusted under the nails….What was all that about? Flo Bones probably had a better manicure, and she made her living scraping holes in river-ooze. The skull was right: I wasn’t in good shape. Sometime over the winter, I’d stopped taking care of myself; I’d let myself go.
But in the meantime, I had been focusing on something else, and that was my Talent. Could I control it better now? I thought so, yes—working with adult supervisors was an endless test of the emotions, and I’d never come close to losing control. So perhaps, for one time only, it would be safe enough….
It would be good to help them out, redress the balance after the way I’d left them.
I looked over at Lockwood as he sat shoulders-forward, head slightly bowed. He seemed more diffident than I’d ever seen him: not vulnerable, exactly, but certainly exposed. After what I’d done, it must have been so difficult for him to come here.
“There are other Listeners out there,” I said. “Good ones, too.”
“Like who?”
“Kate Godwin’s okay.”
“Oh, come on. She’s not half the Listener you are.”
“There’s Leora Jones of Grimble, Melita Cavendish at Rotwell…”
“As good as you? You don’t believe that! How many of them can buddy up to a talking skull?”
“I don’t buddy up to it.”
Lockwood made a face. “Whatever. Besides, they’re not freelance, are they?”
This was true. And he was quite right, incidentally. The rest paled in comparison to me. Only one other person had ever spoken with ghosts the way I did, and she’d died long ago. I was silent for a while.
Lockwood started to get to his feet. “It’s okay, Lucy. I understand your reluctance, and I don’t blame you in the slightest. I’ll go back and tell the others.”
“I suppose doing a job for Penelope Fittes might get me noticed,” I said.
He hesitated. “It very well might, yes.”
“And it would really help out Lockwood and Co., you say?”
“It really would, Luce.”
“So if it’s just a one-off…”
“Yes.”
“And you really think my Talent would make a difference…”
“There’s no one else I would want at my side.”
Strange, sometimes, how you make a particular choice. When it’s not a specific thought or line of argument that decides you, but more a set of jumbled sensations that changes your mind. I’d been ready to say no to him the entire time; even at the very end I was opening my mouth to apologize and say good-bye. But then images passed across my vision, like a pack of cards being flicked in front of my eyes. I saw Lockwood, George, and Portland Row, the house and life I’d left behind. I saw the Fittes furnaces, and moments from my solitary walks through London. I saw the hapless Rotwell team; most of all I saw Mr. Farnaby himself, in all his swollen pomposity and heartlessness, turning his back on me.