While he labored, the rest of us drew back from Chelsea. Lockwood visited it once or twice more, but achieved little, and soon returned to ordinary cases. This was what I was doing too. We didn’t, however, work on anything together. With her usual cool efficiency, Holly Munro divided things equally between us, juggling our clients and our time.
Holly had been hired to give us respite and enable us to work more easily as a team. It was a strange thing, but we now seemed busier—and more isolated from each other—than ever before. Somehow Lockwood and I never went in the same direction, or even went out at the same moment. We got up at different hours. When we met at home, our smiling assistant was generally there too. Since the Bloody Footprints debacle, he and I had rarely been alone. And Lockwood seemed happy enough for it to continue that way.
I didn’t think he was still angry. I’d somehow have preferred it if he had been. He just appeared to have removed himself from me, cloaked himself in the old detachment that had never really gone away. He was always scrupulously polite; he answered my questions, made bland inquiries into how I was getting on. Otherwise he ignored me. His head wound healed; only the faintest scar showed on his forehead, just below the hairline. Like everything else about him, he wore it well; but I knew it to be a sign of my incompetence and failure, and the sight of it pierced my heart.
I couldn’t help feeling annoyance, too. Yes, I had brought him—and the others—into danger; I’d messed up, I couldn’t deny it. That didn’t excuse the way he’d locked himself away, as if behind iron barricades, and utterly shut me out.
This was how it had always been with Lockwood, of course. Silence was his default response. He’d probably been like this ever since Jessica died.
Her younger brother was unable to stop the attack…
A case in point: his sister. He’d told us something about her, but hardly enough. I still didn’t understand what had actually happened in that room. Without his testimony it was impossible to know.
Actually—not impossible. It could be done. I had Talents that could find things out. As I walked across that landing in my anger and frustration, I often glanced at that door.
A week passed. George worked; Holly organized; the skull made regular rude comments. Lockwood and I kept going our separate ways. Now large posters were appearing near every Tube station advertising the coming carnivaclass="underline" elegant Fittes ones, with silver hue and sober font, inviting us to “Reclaim the Night”; garishly bright ones for the Rotwell Agency, complete with a grinning cartoon lion trampling a ghost and holding a huge hot dog in its paw. Meanwhile, each day saw further demonstrations in the streets around Chelsea, clashes between protesters and police: people injured, water cannons used. The night of the grand festivity approached in a tense and nervous atmosphere.
Lockwood had originally been reluctant to attend the carnival, as he was annoyed that we hadn’t been asked to contribute to the agency procession. To our surprise, however, we received a special invitation. Miss Wintergarden—now luxuriating in the freedom of her ghost-free town house—was one of the VIPs accompanying the procession on the lead float. She invited us to join her as her guests.
The prospect of such a central position was one Lockwood could not resist. On the afternoon of the great day, the four of us made our way across London to the Fittes mausoleum, which was where the carnival would begin.
Yes, that’s right. The four of us. Holly Munro came too.
The mausoleum stood at the eastern end of the Strand, at the point where it became Fleet Street. It occupied an island in the center of the road. A church had stood there once, but it had been bombed in the war, and the stark, gray building that housed Marissa Fittes’s remains was its replacement. It was oval-shaped, with a concrete dome. On the western side two majestic pillars framed the entrance, which faced back in the direction of Fittes House. A triangular pediment atop the pillars was carved with the Fittes emblem: a noble unicorn. Monumental bronze doors led into the interior, which on special days was open so that the public could see the pioneer’s simple granite tomb.
Darkness was falling now, but the carnival was a display of organized defiance, and there were many reassurances on show. Ghost-lamps hung suspended on cables above the roads. Lavender fires burned on corners. Lamplit smoke swirled above the crowds that washed between the buildings like a restless tide.
Higher still, a giant inflatable rapier, silvered, shiny, and the length of a London bus, bobbed and buffeted against the soft, black night. The entrances to Waterloo Bridge and the Aldwych were choked with booths and sideshows. “Shoot the ghost” stalls rubbed up against “Poltergeist rides,” in which vast mechanized arms whirled shrieking men and women into the air. Merry-go-rounds featured cartoon phantoms, stalls sold cobweb cotton candy; sweets in the form of skulls, bones, and ectoplasm were everywhere on display. As with the midsummer fairs that normally featured such entertainment, it was the adults who were the most eager customers. Tonight they were protected; tonight the central streets were lined with lavender and salt, turning this artery of London into a fairyland of color that could be exploited safely. They hurried past us, men and women, old and younger, faces flushed with excitement at the transgression and the danger of it. An air of forced hilarity hung over them. I could feel their desperate need to turn their night fears into something childlike and unthreatening.
We stood silently at a corner, hands on our sword hilts, watching the world skip by.
“The grown-ups seem happy,” Lockwood said. “Don’t you feel old, sometimes?”
“Yeah,” George said. “All the same…”
Lockwood nodded. “Yes, I could do with some ice cream, too.”
“I’ll get them,” I said. There was a stand opposite. “Holly? What do you want? A lentil and hummus wedge, or something?”
Her hair was pulled back beneath a fur-lined hat, showing her face to good advantage. She had on that coat that was ever-so-slightly like Lockwood’s, and, to my annoyance, wore a rapier, too. “Actually, I think a soft-serve twist. It’s a special occasion.”
“Oh, I thought you only did healthy.” I went to the stand and got in line for cones.
Beyond the mausoleum I could see the carnival procession waiting—a row of ornate floats, constructed on the open tops of Sunrise Corporation trucks, and decorated with agency colors. On some, giant logos had been erected. The looped chains of Tendy & Sons wobbled on the end of a white mast; behind them I spotted the Grimble fox and the all-seeing owl of Dullop and Tweed. Each had been fashioned from papier-mÂché, steel, and wood, then gaudily painted. They were vast effigies twenty feet high. Around them stood willing young agents, ready to lob candy and pamphlets into the crowds. There were one or two show floats, too, housing troupes of actors who were to recreate famous scenes from agency history. Shivering corpses in white makeup prepared for battle with gallant agents dressed in historic costumes. They would perform throughout the parade.
At the head of the line stood the largest vehicle, decked out in red and silver, the colors of the two great agencies. Above it, bobbing gently against the darkened sky, hung two vast helium balloons, firmly cabled—a unicorn and a rampant lion, the symbols of Fittes and Rotwell respectively. You could just see the chairs where Penelope Fittes and Steve Rotwell would sit.
“Miss Carlyle? Lucy Carlyle?”
“Yes?” The voice had barely carried above the noise of the crowd, and I didn’t recognize it. Nor did I at first make much of the very short and stocky person, swathed in a fur overcoat, with a broad-brimmed bowler hat concealing his bent head, who stepped suddenly toward my line. His trousers were of soft velvet; beneath them, expensive patent leather boots shone in the white lamplight. I caught a glimpse of an ivory cane held between heavily jeweled fingers; then, with a swift flick of his wrist, he tipped the hat back so that his face was revealed. It was a boy with a broad smooth countenance, a wide mouth and cheeks that subsided into his soft thick neck like folds of uncooked dough. Strands of oiled black hair were visible at the temples. Small eyes glared at me, sharp and blue as crystal shards.