Malcolm smiled. "Actually, we'd heard there was to be a meeting here this evening, of Theosophists, and wanted to learn a bit more."
Yeats brightened. "Splendid! We'll be meeting upstairs, sir, in a quarter of an hour."
Malcolm glanced at Conroy Melvyn, who nodded slightly. "Excellent! I believe I'll tell my carriage driver to return rather later than I'd anticipated. We'll join you shortly, I hope?"
The two Irish poets took their leave, heading upstairs, and Malcolm turned towards the entrance, intent on letting the driver know they'd be longer than an hour—and paused, startled. Their party was one short. "Where the devil is Mr. Pendergast?"
Conroy Melvyn, who had been peering up the staircase after the poets, started slightly. The police inspector looked around with a sheepish expression. "Eh?"
"Pendergast," Malcolm repeated, "where the deuce has he gone?"
Pavel Kostenka swallowed nervously and said in a whisper that wouldn't carry very far, "I cannot imagine. He was here just a moment ago."
"Yes," Malcolm said irritably, "he was. And now he isn't. Bloody reporters! We'd better search for him at once."
Within ten minutes, it was clear that Guy Pendergast was no longer anywhere inside the Carlton Club, because he had been seen retrieving his hat, cane, and gloves. The doorman said, "Why, yes, Mr. Moore, he left in a tearing hurry, caught a hansom cab."
"Did you hear him give the driver directions?"
"No, sir, I'm afraid I didn't."
Malcolm swore under his breath. "Damn that idiot journalist! Gentlemen, I'm afraid our mission on your behalf will simply have to wait for another evening. Dr. Kostenka, Mr. Melvyn, we must return to Spaldergate immediately. This is very serious. Bloody damned serious. A reporter on his own without a guide, poking about London and asking questions at a time like this... He'll have to be found immediately and brought back, before he gets himself into fatal trouble."
The Ripper scholars were visibly furious at having their evening's mission cut short, particularly with the meeting getting underway upstairs, but even they realized the crisis another missing up-timer represented. The Scotland Yard inspector at least had the good grace to be embarassed that he'd allowed the reporter to give them the slip so easily. The driver of the Time Tours carriage which had brought them to the Carlton Club hadn't noticed Pendergast leave, either, and berated himself all the way back to Spaldergate House for his careless inattention. "Might've followed the bloody fool," the driver muttered under his breath every few moments. "Dammit, why'd the idiot go and hire a hansom cab? I'd have taken him anywhere he wanted to go!"
Malcolm had his own ideas about that, which were confirmed less than half an hour later, when they re-entered Time Tours' London gatehouse. Guy Pendergast had returned to Spaldergate, very briefly. Then he and Dominica Nosette had left again, taking with them all their luggage and one of Spaldergate's carriages—without obtaining the Gilberts' permission first.
Fresh disaster was literally staring them square in the face.
Not only had they lost the tourist Benny Catlin, they had now lost two members of the Ripper Watch team, who clearly had defected to pursue the case on their own. Malcolm, operating on less than three hours' sleep a night for several weeks straight, tried to think what Guy Pendergast might possibly have seen or heard tonight to send him haring off on his own, defying all rules set for members of the Ripper Watch tour. Malcolm had been so focused on Yeats, he hadn't been doing his job. And that was inexcusable. Only once before had Malcolm lost a tourist: Margo, that ghastly day in Rome, in the middle of the Hilaria celebrations. It did not improve his temper to recall that both times, he'd been focused on his own desires, rather than the job at hand.
Without the faintest idea where to begin searching for the renegade reporters, Malcolm did the only thing he could do and still remain calm. He stalked into the parlour, poured himself a stiff scotch, and started reviewing potential alternative career options.
Crossingham's doss house smelled of mildew and unwashed clothes, of sweat and stale food and despair. When Margo and Shahdi Feroz stepped into the kitchen, it was well after dark and bitterly cold. They found a sullen, smoking coal fire burning low in the hearth and nearly twenty people crowded nearby, most of them women. There were no chairs available. Most of the room's chairs had been dragged over to the hearth by those lucky enough to have arrived early. The rest of the exhausted, grubby occupants of Crossingham's kitchen sat on the floor as close to the fire as they could manage. The floor was at least neat and well-swept despite its worn, plain boards and deep scuffs from thousands of booted feet which had passed across it.
Margo paid the lodging house's caretaker, Timothy Donovan, for a cuppa and handed it over to Shahdi, then paid for another for herself. " ‘ere, luv," Margo said quietly to the Ripper scholar, using her best Cockney voice, "got a cuppa tea for you, this'll warm you up nice."
The tea was weak and bitter, with neither sugar nor milk to alter the nasty flavor. Margo pulled a face and sipped again. Recycled tea leaves, no doubt—if there was even any real tea in this stuff. The demand for tea was so high and the price of new leaves so steep, an enormous market existed for recycled tea. Used leaves, carefully collected by housewives and servants, were sold to the tea men who came door-to-door, buying them up in bulk. The tea men, in turn, redried them, dyed them dark again, pressed them into "new" bricks, and resold them to cheaper chandlers' shops scattered throughout the East End. There was even a black market in counterfeit tea, with leaves of God-alone knew what and even bits of paper dyed to look like tea, sold in carefully pressed little bricks to those unable to afford real tea often enough to know the difference in taste.
Margo tucked up her skirts and found a spot as close to the fire as she could manage, then balanced Shahdi's teacup for her so the scholar could sit down. Both of them carefully adjusted their frayed carpet bags with the irreplaceable scout logs inside, so they lay across their laps and out of reach of anybody with lighter-than-average fingers. Margo noticed curious—and covetous—glances from several nearby women and most of the men. Very few of the people in Crossingham's owned enough goods in this world to put into a carpet bag.
"Wotcher got in the bag, eh, lovie?" The woman beside Margo was a thin, elderly woman, somewhere in her mid-sixties, Margo guessed. She stank of gin and spilt ale and clothes too many months—or years—unlaundered.
Margo made herself smile, despite the stench. "Me owd clothes, wot I'm aimin' to pawn, soon's I got a place to sleep. That an' me lovin' father's shirts, may God send ‘im to burn, drunken bastard as ‘e is. Was, I mean. They ‘anged ‘im last week, for ‘is tea leafin' ways."
"Never easy, is it," another woman muttered, "when the owd bastard thieves ‘is way through life ‘til ‘e's caught an' ‘anged, leavin' a body to make ‘er own way or starve. Better a live blagger, I says, than a dead ‘usband or father wot ain't no use to anybody. Nobody save the grave digger an' the bleedin' worms."
"Least ‘e won't black me face never again," Margo muttered, "nor drink me wages down to boozer. Good riddance, I says, good riddance to the owd bastard. Could've ‘anged ‘im years ago, they could, an' I'd ‘ave been that ‘appy, I would, that I would ‘ave."
"You got a job, then?" a girl no older than Margo asked, eyes curious despite the fear lurking in their depths. She reminded Margo of a rabbit hit once too often by a butcher's practice blows.