That Anonymous John had been smuggling materiel into the city by way of warehouses such as this was common knowledge-but Trowth’s enormous, sprawling docks, which covered nearly every inch of the available coastline sheltered by its great sea-wall, and even spread almost fully up the length of the Stark, were impossible to police effectively. Moreover, Anonymous John had been using a complex, rotating system of import locations, using one while preparing two more, so that he could rapidly move his entire operation out from beneath the scrutiny of local law enforcement. Only a few men were given the full rotation, and unfortunately for John, Sergeant Codrington had been one of them.
The Lobstermen went in first, bedecked in blood-slick bone armor, faster and stronger than any ordinary man, and armed with long-pin rifles, whose deadly rounds flew faster than the sound they made. After a few sharp cracks and the whines of flying bullets, shabbily-dressed men swarmed out from the warehouses and into the waiting arms of the gendarmerie. They were shackled and escorted to local prison cells with a minimum of unnecessary violence-a miracle by all accounts, as the gendarmes were as a whole infuriated by what amounted to Anonymous John’s declaration of open war against them. Only a handful of smugglers had arms or jaws or eye sockets broken, and only one, who rather ill-advisedly tried to escape custody while his captors were otherwise occupied, was brought down by two especially enthusiastic men and did not, sadly, survive the onslaught of their nightsticks.
In all, nearly a hundred smugglers had been captured, and thousands of crowns worth of merchandise. Nothing in the goods reclaimed by Beckett and his men appeared to have heretical uses, however; the smuggled wares appeared to consist primarily of suffragist and explicit literature, an unseemly number of brandy casks from the embargoed nation of Thranc, and close to two tons of Sarpeki wool, undoubtedly smuggled in to avoid excessive tariffs. It would be of shoddy quality, of course, and sold at cut-rates to textile mills up the river, before being sent back down the river to populate Trowth’s high-end clothing boutiques.
Out of spite, Beckett did not permit any of the smugglers to be remanded to custodies indoors until every single item was accounted for. They were obliged to stand in the chilly, pouring rain for over six hours, until Beckett was satisfied with the inventory, and handed the whole lot over to representatives to the Bureau of Trade, Excises, and Licensure. Though no heretical materials were confiscated, Beckett’s raid was generally considered a great success, and evidence that his and Stitch’s advocacy for a more empowered Coroner’s Division was working precisely the way it was supposed to.
Twenty-Five
“Well,” said Valentine, “I did say-”
“Yes.” Skinner said, a little more forcefully than she might have intended. “Yes you did, I should have listened, your cousin is an unconscionable monster, et cetera and so forth, I would like to move on to the next stage of the conversation, now.”
“All right, all right.” Silver and porcelain scraped delicately against each other, as Valentine added sugar to his tea. It was late to be drinking tea, but neither of them found themselves predisposed to sleep. “Well, obviously, you can stay here for as long as you like-”
“I-”
“I know, I know you don’t want to stay here for long. I’m just saying that you can. I suppose that going back to your family isn’t an option?”
Skinner thought back on her parents’ tiny house in Lower West Seagirt, her mother surrounded by piles of strangers’ laundry that she would clean and mend while her father slept the days away, recuperating from his night-shift at the mill. The house deathly quiet and suffocatingly hot, its ever-changing topography of laundry making it impossible to navigate. The unconquerable gap between mother and daughter whose spheres of experience were utterly alien to each other.
“No,” Skinner said, quietly. “Not really.”
“So. All right, you just need to get your own place. I could rent it for you, that’s fine. I mean, it’s ridiculous that a grown woman should have to do that…’sword, I’m starting to sound like a suffragist.”
“You could do worse.”
“Yes, I suppose I could.” Valentine slurped his tea, noisily. “Have you got any money? I’ve got…well, my father has an estate agent who’s been looking at properties down by Arsenal Close, that’s not too bad a neigborhood.”
Skinner shook her head. “The theater has all the royalties from the play. I spent my last wages from the Coroners months ago.” She clenched her jaw and slowly cracked the knuckles on her right hand, one at a time. “I didn’t realize,” Skinner said, furious at herself but still trying to keep her voice level, “that I was living on Emilia’s sufferance.”
“Ahm,” Valentine replied, in a way he probably imagined was consoling. “You wouldn’t be the first person to make that mistake. Well, I could give you-” He drowned this sentence in a coughing fit as he saw Sknner’s expression. “No, well. Well there’s got to be a way…I mean, the playhouses have never been afraid of shirking the law before. You know theater-people, they’ll do anything. Surely you could get work…?”
“No,” Skinner said. “I can’t prove I’ve written anything. Everything was kept so secret. It’s a shame, too; now that Theocles is on the Black List, it would probably sell like gangbusters.”
“Yes…oh. Oh!”
“What is it?”
“I’ve just devised a plan. A good plan. Oh, this feels nice. Is it always like this?”
“Is what like what?”
Valentine began chuckling to himself. “I can’t tell you! I can’t tell you about it yet, it will be a surprise.” He was on his feet at once pacing back and forth, rubbing his hands together. “This is excellent, oh my! I’ve got some leave coming from the Coroners,” Valentine said. “A few weeks, anyway, that I can take. Beckett will hardly miss me. You heard about the raid on Front Street? He’s got a fire under him now. You know how he gets. He’s like a bullet now, he’ll be tearing Anonymous John’s organization apart for weeks. He probably won’t even notice that I’m gone.”
“Valentine, what are you going to do? You have to tell me.”
“No! It is a plan both cunning and secret. I will say no more about it!” He stopped pacing. “Now, I shall go check to make sure that Karine is settled in all right.”
“Oh.”
“What?”
Skinner shrugged. “Nothing. Go on. I’ve got to try and get some sleep.”
“Uhm. Yes. Right, so do I. At the office. Where they have cots.”
“Yes.”
Valentine cleared his throat. Then cleared his throat a second time. Then said, “Yes. Well. Good night.”
“Good night, Valentine.”
Valentine Vie-Gorgon hesitated only for a moment before discreetly leaving the young lady to her room, exchanging another polite “good night” with Karine, and then leaving his house and stepping into the pouring rain.
Beckett lay on his back, staring at the disorder of plaster swirls on his ceiling. He could feel the exhaustion, in some distant orbit around his body, separated by vast tracts of empty space and the gentle warmth of the veneine. It never came to claim him, though. He’d been using djang-small, concentrated amounts of the stuff that people drank to wake themselves up in the morning-in order to combat the lassitude that the increasingly large doses of veneine brought on.
The doctors told him that he’d likely eventually hit a balance. The veneine would make him tired, the djang would pick him up; in the right proportion, he’d soon reach a kind of equilibrium that would put him back to normal, only with no pain. If that was true, the miraculous balance he hoped to achieve was a long way off. Right now, the djang stopped him from sleeping, but the veneine muddled his thoughts enough that he couldn’t think of anything to do but lie in bed and stare at the ceiling.