The Mysterious Case of Mr. Strangeway (The St. Croix Chronicles) (7 page)

Instead, as I fell to the hardwood floor at his feet, his eyes shredded the remains of my composure with knife-like disdain. “You are a child,” he told me, in tones that warned he did not care for children. “You have no sense and even less hope of achieving whatever it is you claim to want.”

I scrambled to my feet. “You—”

He turned his back. “Go home, wash the black off and be a good girl. These matters are not for you.” The door closed on his final words, leaving me in stunned, bitterly angry silence.

Thus did my first meeting with the ringmaster of the Midnight Menagerie set the tone for subsequent visits.

Chapter Ten

I am not ashamed to admit that I cried. Sheer frustration conspired to strip me of my composure, and I sobbed in anger, embarrassment and an increasing amount of pain. I had received my first collecting wound, I had run into the obstinate wall that was Hawke’s cruel indifference, and I had lost my quarry.

I was a terrible collector.

And this too brought tears to my eyes.

Once more, I found myself feeling lonely between the worlds I had been forced into. I had been a
thing
all my remembered life, bound to a different sort of master than simple servitude. Though the bonds were prettier, it seemed that I would remain in oppression. I was not strong enough to be the collector I had demanded of myself. Gilded cage or otherwise, this new Society life would never fill the hole I felt.

A hole that the night’s dosage of pain-relieving opium only diminished. It could not heal the ache I felt.

I am not sure how long I sat in the lane the Menagerie’s footmen had deposited me in, mired in shadow and the thick, choking fog, choking under the weight of my aching heart, but I was not approached, and if I was watched, I did not know. A mess of black soot, smudged filth, tears and terrible frustration was I—convinced that my life was over.

This point, the lowest I can recall clearly enough to remember it as something other than a dream, became the match that would light the wick of my aspirations. For this was the moment in which a deliberate disregard for the expectations of others overwhelmed the inner voice of the young girl who sobbed for help.

Purposefully goaded or carelessly delivered, I chose that moment to accept Hawke’s unspoken challenge.

Dusting myself off did little more than smear the black soot about in a cloud of gray particles, but the act made me feel briskly resolved. There was one clue I had not considered, a hint that seemed to me as obvious now as if it were lit by an aether glow.

Mr. Chattersham’s name had earned a reaction from the mysterious Mr. Strangeway. So much so that I had easily noticed the difference, cracking his shell of supposed ennui. Mr. Chattersham, whose address for purposes of claiming the bounty placed him in Spitalfields, would have answers for me.

Perhaps through him, I might learn the nature of Mr. Strangeway’s debts—and what tied him so clearly to the pleasure gardens below the drift.

Find a weakness, find my answer.

As Big Ben’s bells tolled the ten o’clock hour, I made my way out of London’s Limehouse district, avoiding all I could by way of back streets and careful maneuvering. I was not sure whether Mr. Chattersham would be available, or whether I would come upon an empty abode, but I would wait all bloody night if I was forced to.

I would not be bilked of my bounty.

Spitalfields was north and west of Limehouse, once known for its bustling factories and prominent textile industry. Since French silks had proven so much cheaper, however, the whole of the borough had declined, leaving much of it in wallowing in poverty.

Passing through Whitechapel—years before the notorious murders that would find me hunting on these very streets—left me with a sense of surreal uncertainty, as if I walked as a ghost through the fog-shrouded streets. The occasional body, most often men and occasionally a knot of younger sorts devoid of obvious gender, passed like mirages. The fog shifted around us, fingers of mustard-streaked soot, and rife with the smell of smoke, damp, and occasionally, a bit of moldering rot.

As the low houses cleared from the all-encompassing shroud, squatting tightly in close lanes, I found my location by way of a sign all but blackened into uselessness. Mr. Chattersham’s written address placed him just south of Flower and Dean Street, which was a great deal more fortunate than I had known to give credit at the time. The common lodging houses on Flower and Dean Street were among the meanest and most dangerous of the borough, a center for the prostitutes that inhabited the area and all the many picker men working with, for, or over them.

I was too fresh for Flower and Dean Street, easy pickings even with all the know-how I’d accrued in my strange childhood. The cough I muffled, the constant clearing of my throat and reddened eyes would give my game away so much quicker than even opening my mouth, and heaven only knew what sort of fine fettle that would land me in.

So it was that I passed under the eaves of the worst the impoverished Spitalfields had to offer, my naiveté of London gone unnoticed by eyes much sharper than mine, at this age.

Instead, I located Wentworth Street, a road that bypassed many of the larger factories now gone quiet save for the boiling cloud of smoke and soot that some still spewed into the night. Voices and figures were more plentiful here, although none bore the distinctive mark of Society. Not here. Them that wanted company would choose the stews or Limehouse, not the often pox-riddled flesh of the Spitalfields doxies.

By the time I found Mr. Chattersham’s given address, I was unsurprised to learn it led to a dark textile factory, its windows blackened and only a single light burning above a wide wooden door across a gaping courtyard stripped of anything aesthetically pleasing. Broken stone and discarded rubble told a tale of landscaping gone utterly ignored, and the dilapidated facings engendered some doubt as to the ability of Mr. Chattersham to pay such a large purse.

Although I stepped into the open gate easily enough, I hesitated just inside, suddenly loathe to reveal myself to the struggling lamplight over the stained door.

This was most assuredly a place of work. If this were true, then Mr. Chattersham would like as not be home, abed, like any other working man not currently involved with a dollymop’s charms.

Doubt assailed me.

What would I do? I could leave and return by day, but this seemed a dangerous prospect at best, and more likely to turn my newfound profession less a secret. Yet I could not guess where Mr. Chattersham made his home, and so I could not go to speak to him direct.

Hawke had made clear that he would not help me, and Mr. Strangeway seemed less than inclined to save his own skin—or turn it in.

I huffed out a dry, scratchy breath, then cleared my throat again when it only made the tickle at the back worse.

The stench was stronger here, thick with coal drift and the remnant pong of the nearby tanneries. My journey had been pleasant enough, as opium made most things bearable that might otherwise be considered a chore, but I was becoming increasingly aware of the pain in my side, and the stiffness of my toes in my boots. I was cold, beginning to ache from head to heel and more than a little frustrated with the nature of this collection.

Ready to give up, I took a deep breath.

Only to exhale it on a hard cough, partially a scream, as a gloved hand slipped over my mouth. “I’ve had just about enough of you,” muttered a voice I recognized.

It was this that saved him a bolloxing—or myself the discomfort of attempting one—for as he allowed me to turn, disengaging from his grasp, I scowled my outrage at Mr. Strangeway.

I found him made of metal.

It should not have surprised me. In a way, it did not. The knowledge of all that I’d missed clicked into place like a cog whose teeth finally merged with that of its working brothers. Yet that very fact I’d been the one to assume galled. “You,” I hissed, because everything else seemed too complicated to voice.

Although the bucket-like helmet was tucked under one arm, the rest of his apparel was so odd as to be nearly impossible to pick out. Where I expected a finished edge, there was only a solid piece of worked brass, etched with the scars of previous troubles. The dingy color did nothing to help my gaze take in detail, but I identified elements of resin across the shoulders, worked into plating on the arms.

Once more, I recognized the creak of leather as he shifted his weight, and I remembered the bit of leather at Mr. Strangeway’s throat earlier today.

I could have spit nails, I was that frustrated with my own blindness. “You should have told me,” I all but snarled.

“My dear lass, why ever for?” His features had lost their laconic ease, his eyes now fully open and all but black in the shadows. The pale edges of his features looked sharp as I’d never seen them, even when he’d give me his earlier attention. “The question I retain, now, is what in the devil’s hairy tits are you doing here?”

I planted my fisted hands upon my hips, thrusting out my chin. Hirsute bosom or no, the devil would have more than this to answer for, if I had any say. “I’d told you I planned to collect you.”

“Weren’t
you
told to leave it?”

“Not by anyone that has a say.”

His mouth quirked into a slant that was almost sympathetic. “You’re an odd bird, lass. And too bloody stubborn.” He turned a bit, just enough to glance back the way he’d come—the same way I’d come, to be sure, and that was enough to give me a bit of a shudder. Had he been behind me the whole time, then?

As he turned back, the faint light from the struggling lamp caught on the golden handle of a firearm that had not been there when first we’d met—collector to what I’d assumed was collector.

I gasped. “What are you carrying?”

The question seemed to disconcert him somewhat. “What?”

“There.” I pointed to his hip, and the wide-mouthed holster affixed to his leg. “That was empty when first we met.”

Reflexively, or so it seemed to me, he covered the grip with one hand. “She’s just here for a bit of reassurance.”

It looked wickedly heavy, and more than a little dangerous. From the leather straps holding it in place, I saw bits of copper piping, polished wood and what seemed like wires running along the haft.

My eyes widened. I took a hasty step back, which placed me perilously close to the edge of our shadowed nook, even as I struggled to keep my expression away from the shaft of fear suddenly spiraling inside my belly.

Had he come to kill Mr. Chattersham? Was this my doing?

He must have understood more than I let on, for the look he gave me was pained. “I assure you, I did not come here to murder you in the dark.” Not quite what I’d been thinking, but as he added, “I’d no idea you’d be here, else I might have been better equipped,” my temper bent.

“Now you look here,” I said hotly, this time taking a step forward—an awkward dance in the fog-choked depths of Spitalfields. “You are the quarry who chose to make things difficult. ’Tis not my fault that you’re the fool in debt.” In a role real or imagined, debt was debt, and must be paid.

Obligation was the sort of thing that greased the gears of street society, and it could kill a body as easy as help him. One did not allow one’s debts to languish.

His head tipped back, free hand going to cup his own forehead as if it ached. “God save me from stubborn lasses.” The tone suggested he’d met more than a few. Finally, he lowered his hands—but kept them away from his weapon as I jumped, wary as a rabbit. “Listen to me,” he said softly, moderating his voice to a gentle note. “I am here to right a wrong.”

I glared at him, mouth sealed tightly. He’d have to do better than that to convince me to let him go. I was not so far gone that I’d simply waltz into any man’s ream of thin excuses.

He must have sensed it, for Mr. Strangeway pointed beyond me, to the looming factory. “That is a textile mill, owned by one man, but maintained by its foreman, Barnaby Chattersham. A foreman that has been acquiring young girls for its manufacturing. Girls not unlike you.”

“Bollocks,” I replied—with, I might add, no small amount of relish. He winced. “’Twould be a pox on any toff fool enough to sign off on a foreman’s requests without knowing the thing.”

“The
thing
,” he replied, mimicking my haughty tone with emphasis, “is much more complex than you aspire to think it. Until you are in possession of a business, you cannot know.”

“Enlighten me,” I challenged.

“Saints take you,” he growled. “Fine, but pay close attention.”

Chapter Eleven

Strangeway gestured, once more taking in the black about us. “This is one of many founts of commerce for the lord, and one of many foremen to do the work. Foremen are chosen to maintain each factory and send the coin on after his share, and so a man of business puts his trust in his men. Pox it may be, but he’s floating in wealth while you and I are left to reason why.”

I narrowed my stinging eyes. “What does this have to do with your girls?”

“Stolen labor is akin to slave labor,” he said succinctly. “Parliament may have abolished slavery on paper, but it has not lessened the need. Girls stolen and unaccounted work for less than the workers now clamoring across the empire for union.”

I studied him. “You are making this up, sir.”

“I am not.” He gestured round the darkened courtyard with the helmet, faceplates glinting. “Look around you. Does this look like the sort of property a lord with a rich purse would maintain? That bounty is beyond a foreman’s means, it’s a mere trap. I am telling you the truth in the hopes that you, thickheaded thing that you are, might actually give a toss for your own well-being.”

I would, if I believed it. I didn’t. Men like Mr. Strangeway often fibbed for whatever devious purposes they maintained. “You have no evidence.”

“I don’t—!” Abruptly, he cut off his pitched snarl, scrubbing his hand down his face as if suddenly exhausted.

I folded my arms over my chest, feeling both awkward and righteous. After all, he was the quarry. He would say anything to save his skin.

Except...

What if he were right?

It seemed to me that any man who dressed in such outlandish gear might know a thing or two more than I did. Dressed like that, he expected trouble—and to have the tools to make armor of brass and resin indicated a certain amount of intelligence otherwise lacking from what I assumed a run-of-the-mill quarry might possess.

Did Mr. Chattersham know of Mr. Strangeway’s interest?

Perhaps, now that I looked about more thoroughly, it made a certain sense that a man who allowed his premises to fall to such disrepair could not afford the bounty posted.

Perhaps it was all a trap after all. If that were the case, then I had been lied to—yes, again—and this was a mantle I tired of bearing. “Are you even J. F. Strangeway?” I demanded. “Is that truly your name?”

His gaze held mine, now more imploring than exasperated—and filled with more than a hint of steel. “My Christian name is John, but I’m no relation to the family I’d claimed. There are many Johns and enough Strangeways of Irish descent to fill the role. It was an excellent mask, wouldn’t you say?”

I would, and was rather impressed by the courage it took to maintain such a charade. It certainly proved that Society would bend trust to the point of foolishness if it were for the right appearances. A disgraced heir returned to the site of his family’s falling was too delicious a rumor to pass up.

“Why are you involved?” I asked, frowning. “Are you even a collector?”

“No,” he admitted. “But I’d heard the phrase and realized using it would absolve all manner of sins.”

Tricky, that. And dangerous, if another collector got ahold of him for it. “What does the Fenian Brotherhood care for all this?”

“They don’t, obviously,” came his surprising reply, and this with a hard note of anger to it. “I had hoped to use their connections to help me locate the trail, but they...had other plans. I admit that I knew of their intent to set the dynamite, but I swear to you that I had gone to that train to end the threat.”

“Are you a Fenian by choice?” I demanded.

“Not as such. My ties to the Brotherhood are slim, at best, and mostly by heritage.”

“Then if they don’t care, and you aren’t tied to their cause, why would you care about a passel of taken girls?” I was proud of myself for that bit of deduction. If he were simply here to murder a man, surely he would not have thought of that little gap in reasoning.

He met my eyes with a rare forthrightness I found astonishing. “Chattersham’s men took my sister’s daughter.”

Oh. Oh,
bollocks
. That was something different altogether. I steeled myself, faced him down and asked, “But you did not know ’twas Chattersham?”

“No.” He glanced up at the sky, the faint light picking out his trimmed beard in glints of red. “After I received my sister’s frantic letter, I returned to Ireland to help her and her man search. For months, we searched for my niece’s trail.”

“What of your friend?”

“Smoot?” He folded his arms across his chest. “Unbeknownst to us both, we were on the same search, though for different reasons. His began in America, while mine took me from Ireland and led me across the ocean, here to London.”

Each word plucked a chord of sympathy within me, but I gritted my teeth. “Why now?” I asked. “Why only move against Chattersham now?”

Mr. Strangeway looked away. “It took me a long time to trace the matter to London low, and with the trail cold, I’d all but given up on the whole. That is, until Smoot’s contacts brought him word of a likely culprit.”

Was Mr. Smoot an American authority of some kind? Or simply a privateer on his own? I resolved to ask, but later. “Who was your suspect?”

Now, he shook his head. “I will not drag a good man’s name down to the muck.”

That was less than helpful.

“Leave it by saying that he is a lord to whom I spent a great deal of time indebting myself,” he continued, “only to find that he was utterly innocent of wrongdoing.”

“Bosh,” I said, repeating Mr. Smoot’s dry disbelief in the same tone he’d used on me. This time, Strangeway’s teeth flashed in what could have been a grimace, but might have been a grin. “No lord is free of wrongdoing.”

“You’ve a mouth that will earn you a drubbing, girl,” he said, but without heat. “Aye, I admit to thinking the same as you. I set about turning myself into the type of man a lord up to his fine mustache in slavery might have a use for. I began as a disgraced heir, the better to have access to the clubs and dens he attended, and I proceeded to lose all but my shirt in the same dens. The stews came to know me by name, and the lord came to know the sound of my purse emptying night after night. It was my hope that he would ask from me in service what I could not pay in coin or property.” He grunted, half impatience and half something that seemed rather like amusement. “Then you showed your filthy face, and I realized that my debts had caught up in ways I had not accounted for.”

“That’s what you deserve,” I replied primly, hands on my hips. “Only a fool plays with debt.”

“Aye, well, while I played the fool, I had him investigated thoroughly.” If Strangeway felt at all reproached, he did not allow me to see the mark. “The lord is a gambler and a bit of a reprobate, but he is innocent. His business ventures, however...”

When he let that trail, my chin dropped. I could follow his thought easily, for it would have been the same thoughts I would entertain, were I in his shoes. I closed my eyes. A minor relief from the ongoing sting. “Of all his ventures, you could not be sure which was the culprit without a clue to follow,” I filled in for him.

“A clue you provided,” he allowed. “For which I owe some gratitude, at least. There is no reason in this world for Barnaby Chattersham to want me dead. Even were it for debts, he would get no coin from a corpse.”

A lesson I would take to heart. When all else failed, I learned that night to follow the coin.

His tone flattened, gone tight with an intensity I could not imagine feigning. “Now do you understand? Somehow, by own folly or Chattersham’s allies, my hand was tipped and you were tricked into doing his dirty work for him. Good Irish girls are missing, lass. Scared, alone, and a long way from home.”

I felt the urge to hit something. A wall, a tree. Mr. Strangeway’s metal-covered chest. I settled for pushing my fist into my own palm. “Bloody bells and damn.”

The relief upon his features as I looked up nearly undid me there and then.

If the bit about his niece was simple Irish blarney, he was a deucedly good actor. I sighed. “Very well.”

“You will let me go?”

“No.”

Like magic, the exasperation was back, etched in aggrieved lines around his whisker-bracketed mouth.

“But,” I continued, smiling because I could not help the little thrill of satisfaction his reaction gave me, “I will help you.”

What emotions warred in his face shuttered. “No.”

“You lack the choice,” I assured him, ignoring him as he folded his arms over his chest like some forbidding father. “I will go with you, and we shall cover more territory together than if I were working against you, don’t you think?”

A tic in his jaw, just under his eye, told me I’d scored a hit he didn’t like. “It’s not safe.”

“Yes, which is why you should not go alone.” I paused, frowning. “Where is Mr. Smoot?”

“
Captain
Smoot,” he replied, stressing the title I’d refused to afford, “is at Chattersham’s home. I have it on good authority that the man himself has been delivered an invite to the Menagerie this very night.” Clever, clever Hawke. I admired that much. “Smoot will be searching for evidence at Chattersham’s home, while
I
attend to this mill.”

I nodded, as if this were perfectly reasonable, and ignored the stress he placed upon the individual goal. “Then it is you
and
I. Shall we?”

“How many times—”

“You go knowing that I am beside you,” I said, thrusting out my jaw and folding my arms over my chest, “or you go knowing that I will not be far behind you. The choice is yours, sir.”

He wasted no more time arguing. Instead, as he turned the helmet over in his hands, he muttered, “Bloody difficult females. Saints preserve me from the lot.” It went on like this, his voice changing as he pulled the helmet tight over his head. Suddenly, I was looking not at Mr. Strangeway, but a faceless, expressionless mask whose very arrangement afforded more intimidation than Strangeway’s own visage.

He tapped the side of the bucket-like covering. “If you’re so bloody-minded about this, you ought to consider protection of a kind,” he told me.

“Perhaps I should.” I would, inspired by this man, but it would take me some time to work out what would become my collecting corset. “First, let us concentrate on our task at hand.”

“I shall go in via the door,” he told me. “You, find a window.”

I could not argue with that. Clad as he was, it was simply good thinking that placed him square in view, while allowing me to circle about and come in undetected.

“If there’s none?” I asked, like him studying the dark and silent factory.

“Then wait for a time and follow, but only once you are certain that there is no one to watch the door.” He unhooked a small lantern from his belt, no bigger than the size of my cupped hands. A match glowed white hot as he struck it. He lit the lantern quickly, held it out. “Take this.”

My respect for Mr. Strangeway climbed a notch. Having heard my determination, he was willing to afford me the opportunity to play my role, rather than force me into a damsel’s distress. I smiled, a toothy thing that must have shown a bit too much of my anticipation, and accepted the offering.

An armored hand settled on my head, holding me in place. “Do not attempt anything rash,” he told me sternly. “I refuse to leave a single lass behind, do you hear me?”

I would be untruthful if I said that a small part of my heart didn’t go out to the earnest Mr. Strangeway in that moment. For that reason, softened by his concern, I agreed. “I shall be cautious as a mouse.” A hungry one, with no fear, and fearsome teeth.

He nodded, let me go, and strode for the wide wooden door.

Taking my cue, I scurried back along the courtyard wall, circling the broken bits of rubble, rotting wood, and untended tools left scattered about. I needed to find a window or alternate door, and fast. I could not leave him alone for too long.

As I tested each blackened window, a part of me desperately hoped that I had not made myself a fool, goaded by the worry in the gentleman’s eyes. I solemnly wished that we would find the missing girls inside.

Because the part of me who had learned to be wary, the part shaped and branded by my time under the employ of a cruel man, was sure that I’d just been had.