She lay still for one moment, her kelp-colored hair streaming, her mouth forming bubbles of terror. Her scaled arms reached for him, the poison-tipped fins at her wrists opening and closing like deep-sea fans. The gold-edged gills on her sides gasped for air. She was being slowly crushed by the weight of air and the want of water.
Help me.
He heard Sally’s screams and the hobnailed boots of the goons as they pounded toward him. He looked up at the Ringmaster running toward him, drawing a revolver from his waistcoat.
As delicately as possible, he gripped the mermaid’s shoulder with his teeth. Then he pulled her hard toward the river, while her sisters sang a sea-dirge for her in the cart behind them.
Terror striped her scales a dull, muddy red. Her watery eyes met his.
Please.
The hound felt something slide across his flanks—a net, perhaps—and through the melee, he heard the click of a mechanism sliding home.
He looked over his shoulder. The Ringmaster loaded the revolver with bullets glowing green with myth and pointed it straight at the mermaid. The hound pushed with all his might. The mermaid wrapped her arms around the rough banisters and pulled herself through, scraping scales onto the stone. For one moment, she hung off the bridge, and then she wriggled through the air and into the roiling river below.
As the bullet left the chamber, the hound dove off the bridge and into the brown stench of the Thames after the mermaid. The screams of bobbies and goons chased him into the water, and two more bullets followed him. One grazed his shoulder, unwinding a thin ribbon of blood into the water. Yelping, he struggled to stay afloat before the strong current pulled him under.
Kelp-green arms surrounded him. I could take you down into the depths, she said softly above the choke and tumble of the waves. We could live happily there, you and me.
He shook his head against her. It was all he could do.
Then be free, little king, she said. But know you will have my gratitude forever. Call on my father’s name, and my people will aid you.
She whispered the name in his ear before the water took him.
Abigail Chen was not who you’d call an ordinary London girl. At a glance, she could pass for full British, with her mother’s brunette curls and lush mouth, but her upswept phoenix eyes and pert nose harkened back to her father’s home in Guangdong. Here in Shadwell, though, her mother held sway as proprietress of the Oriental Quarters, taking in lascars and other refugees who reminded her of her dearly departed husband, Abigail’s father Ah Chen. Canton Kitty, as her mother was called, was indefatigable, a lifeline for those who often struggled in London’s harsh dockyards to make a living. No one would dare speak unkindly to her daughter.
Canton Kitty was not to be crossed, it was true, but Abigail did so regularly. Today, for instance, against her mother’s express orders, she was mudlarking. It seemed fair sport; the Thames was always turning up something interesting. Perhaps she’d find something unusual or valuable on the mudflats that would allow her to finance the more expensive tastes her mother denied her. Maybe a few coins, a silver spoon, something she could take to the rag-and-bone shop in trade. She’d had her eye on a stylish bonnet at the milliner’s stall for quite some time, but her mother had dismissed the need for such frippery out of hand. “You don’t need to be catchin’ no one’s eye with that, Abby-girl,” she said. “When your old bonnet is wore out, we’ll find you something practical. We’re not fancy folk, after all.”
Since her fiancé Edward’s death, with Abby facing the prospect of spinsterhood, her mother saw no point in anything but practicality. Hence, Abby found herself here, holding her skirts as high as she could with one hand and clutching her boots and stockings in the other.
She was near to a bridge—her toes increasingly cold, the stench of the mud beginning to overpower even her normally stolid senses—when she saw the pale lump near one of the pilings. She couldn’t quite figure out what it could be. A dog or a pig, maybe, until she saw the long, narrow foot.
A person.
Every hair on the back of her neck stood up and warned her not to go closer. Since she seldom heeded any warning, she moved closer, cold mud squelching between her toes. The person was a young man, with the fine features of one who shared her heritage. His long black hair was clotted with mud. A silver scar slashed across his nose and ended just under his right eye. A fresh scrape along one bicep was beginning to scab over. She took in the rest of him in one blushing breath because he was quite naked—the broad, hairless chest; the sculpted abdomen…
He was breathing.
Her boots thudded in the mud near his shoulder.
His eyes opened. Rich and deep, like polished amber.
He coughed and sat up, expelling dirty water from his lungs.
She backed up several steps, ready to take flight, boots be damned. But then her bolder nature got hold of her again, and she said, “Reckon I didn’t expect to find this sort of thing today!”
At first, the way he looked at her, she wondered if perhaps she should have tried her father’s native tongue, but she had no sense of whether he was from Canton or farther north.
He saved her the trouble when he said, “Mudlarks seldom prosper.” He half-smiled, and then coughed again.
He sounded like her mother.
Abigail removed her shawl. She handed it to him and said, “I’m Abby Chen, sir. Pleased to make your acquaintance. And you are?”
He covered himself as best he could with the shawl, hiding the faint blush in his cheeks behind the tangle of his hair.
“Syrus Reed,” he mumbled. He paused, uncertain. “Syrus Reed,” he said again, more loudly, as if he’d just remembered his own name.
His face shifted, his lips twisting as he struggled to contain some emotion she could not guess. Perhaps for the first time in her life, cold logic poured down her spine and begged the question of what she thought she was doing helping this stranger, but she brushed it aside and gave him her hand instead.
“Come with me,” she said. Like her mother, she had a softness for strays.
She picked up her boots and led him back to the stairs, cursing softly when she discovered that even her new stockings inside the boots were splattered with mud. “Reckon they’re not the only thing I’m going to have to answer for,” she muttered to herself.
Mr. Reed said nothing, but climbed carefully after her, avoiding the stares and rude gestures of everyone who mocked him and his escort on the way to the Oriental Quarters. They had a long go of it across the rough cobbles, their feet bruised and covered in filth by the time they reached the alley and took the back stairs up to the kitchen.
Abby brought Mr. Reed in through the back door. Cook took such fright that she nearly dropped the entire tureen of soup she was carrying into the dining hall.
“Fetch Mother, please,” Abby said. Cook set down the tureen, threw her apron over her head, and ran from the room.
Abby winced as she searched for something to wipe their feet with, but the stranger stood stock-still by the hearth, as though he feared the kitchen would dissolve if he moved.
A few moments later, Canton Kitty arrived. She was a stout matriarch, dressed in sedate homespun buttoned almost to her chin. Though her mouth was hard, her eyes were kind, and she wore her widow’s cap with grace and a sad pride. She took one look at Syrus and said, “Let’s get him upstairs.”
They helped him up the servant’s stairs, for his legs trembled and did not seem to want to work by the time they reached the narrow little door to the first level of upstairs chambers where Kitty and Abigail lived.