The White Forest (14 page)

“You’re worrying me, Maddy,” I said. “More so every day.” I sat back against the hard bench seat of the Lees’ carriage and watched the narrow streets of London ripple by. Yellow London brick had an interesting effect on my talent. I could hear the bricks marching, as if they were an army, gathering to protect the city.

It was fortuitous that Pascal did not come with us, as his beloved Alexander Hartford was the first Fetch we encountered at the Silver Horne—an establishment of dark oak and cozy gas lamps that was tucked away in an alley off Oxford Street. The Horne was not visible from the street itself. Only the faint glow of firelight reflected on the damp alley bricks betrayed its presence, making it a better environment for the cult of Fetches than a street-facing tavern like the Boar’s Head or the Three Cranes. The Horne smelled of liquor, old cigars, and the brittle leather that upholstered its benches. At least three groups of Fetches were gathered at round tables within, all young men in red coats. The boys seemed restless, as if they hadn’t had enough sleep, and when Maddy and I passed over the threshold (our entrance was a bit sopping and less than elegant due to the rain),
they all looked up with doggish faces. I was glad to see the messenger who’d come to Stoke Morrow was not in their number.

“Ladies,” Alexander said in his flat American accent. He was Boston born, his father a shipping magnate, and his presence was nothing like Pascal’s. I would have never marked him for an invert. He was blond and brutish, taller than most of the boys in the room. He was the sort of young man who should have been cheerful. In fact, he
had
been cheerful not so long ago when I’d first encountered him. But his once silvery blue eyes had turned to lead, and there was a new weight around his jaw. Alexander had become a serious individual, perhaps even morose, and though he had a near-empty pint in his hand, he didn’t seem a bit drunk. “I didn’t think you were the kind of girls to come to a standard unaccompanied,” he said.

“We’re not,” Maddy replied, pulling back on the leash of Ferdinand, who was, in turn, straining forward to sniff at Alexander’s jackboots. “But we’re hoping you men would be civil enough to help us find our friend.”

“Competing with the French inspector, are we?” Alexander said, nudging the boy next to him to rouse him from his stupor. The other boy was of a thicker sort, with a low Dorchester brow. Alexander introduced his companion as Master Rafferty, and Rafferty mumbled some slurry greeting before tipping back his pint glass to take another drink.

“Our investigation has nothing to do with Vidocq,” Maddy said. “All we want is to find Nathan. No legalities.”

“We don’t know anything more than we’ve already told the inspector,” Alexander said. He seemed bored by our presence, but I had a feeling that his boredom was an act to cover restless nerves. “That’s the God’s honest truth, Maddy. We all liked Nathan Ashe. We want him found. He’s one of us, after all, and we Fetches stick together.”

I looked at Rafferty as Alexander spoke, and there was some wince of pain in his heavy face. Was it remorse? It passed too quickly for me to tell.

“So you won’t mind explaining to us exactly what went on at the theater that night,” Maddy said, “the details of the provocation or whatever it was called.”

“You girls know the Fetches are sworn to secrecy,” Alexander said. “What good is a secret society if you start telling every woman in London about it?”

“Forgive me if the rules of boys’ clubs don’t interest me,” Maddy said.

“Probably better if you were on your way.” Alexander gestured toward the door with his pint. “Place gets rowdy as evening wears on. The boys can get a little—restless.”

“Please, Alexander,” I said. “We’re only looking for a bit of information.”

“I
am
sorry,” he replied, suddenly earnest. “It’s just—there’s nothing I can say.”

I was surprised that Maddy backed down at that, suddenly ushering me toward the exit, jerking on Ferdinand’s leash. I paused long enough to call back, “Pascal would like to talk to you, Alexander.
Sleep and Death
, remember? You owe him a final conversation, don’t you?”

Rafferty laughed at this, clapping Alexander hard on the back. Alexander looked queasy, but I didn’t care. I was, in fact,
glad
to trouble him. He’d left Pascal in an utter lurch, and a person like that deserved his share of public humiliation.

“Why didn’t you press Alexander?” I asked Maddy when we’d cleared the door of the Silver Horne. “He surely would have at least spilled some bit of information.”

“Because the other boy looked like he wanted to speak to us alone. Go slowly, Jane, and watch.”

Maddy was correct. A few moments later, before we’d reached the carriage waiting for us in the alley, a drunken voice sounded behind us. Ferdinand issued a warning bark, and Maddy hushed him. Rafferty appeared, still carrying his pint glass as he half-jogged to catch up with us.

“You girls,” he said.

“Yes, us girls,” Maddy replied.

We all stood there for a moment looking awkwardly at one another, letting the rain drench us further.

“You want to know about the provocation on Nathan’s last night?” Rafferty said finally. “I’ll tell you about the provocation, but you got to do something for me in return.”

“I can’t wait to hear what,” Maddy said.

“You have to promise that one day you’ll both let me take you out—make an evening of it. I heard Nathan Ashe used to take you out, and well—I don’t know. I’d like a chance to have an evening,” he said.

There was something so humble about this request; I wanted to tell Maddy to tread carefully.

“You want to take us to dinner?” Maddy asked. “That’s far more innocent than what I was expecting, Mr. Rafferty.”

“You can call me Paul,” he said, bracing himself with one hand against the stone wall of the alley.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked.

“Because I have no love for those boys in there,” he said. “I’m not as much of a flaunter as they are. My family doesn’t make money. I don’t even know why Mr. Day invited me into the group. Some told me he took a liking to me—that he likes fatter boys sometimes—but that’s disgusting to me.”

“Likes them for what?” Maddy asked.

Paul Rafferty made a sour face. “For whatever he gets up to in the solar above the theater. It ain’t the kind of thing you say to girls.”

“An evening with both of us,” Maddy said. “You’ll have it, Paul.”

I wasn’t sure how I felt about her offering me without my consent, but I remained silent.

“I don’t care about their bloody secrets,” Rafferty said, as if convincing himself. “You want to know how the thing went off that night?”

“We very much do,” Maddy said. “Let’s find some shelter where it isn’t quite so wet.”

The three of us stepped beneath the awning of a nearby shop, and the rain continued to pound London as Rafferty told his tale.

“Here’s how it went,” he said, “the last night anybody saw Nathan Ashe. The provocation was called
The Royal Hunt
. Maybe you know that already. We Fetches built a forest in the rooms under the Temple of the Lamb. Hard work. Lots of lifting. Most of those boys can’t do a thing like that. I ended up putting up most of the trees myself. And that night in our forest, we hunted a stag.”

“An actual stag?” I said, thinking of the creature I’d seen in the painted forest when I touched Nathan’s Bible.

Rafferty shook his head. “It was a bloke playing at a stag. The stag was Nathan Ashe.”

I wondered, momentarily, if I had been granted a vision of Nathan’s final night. And if I was seeing those moments, who but Nathan could communicate such images to me? What had he been trying to tell me?

“You
hunted
Nathan?” Maddy asked, incredulous.

“He wore a pair of ridiculous stag’s horns,” Rafferty said, “and a pelt around his shoulders. He tried to hide from us in the forest. It was dark as Hell in there. The only light came from our lanterns. And he was scared because Ariston Day told him that if we caught him, we were allowed to hurt him—just like in a real hunt. And a bunch of the boys wanted to hurt Nathan because he’d become a favorite of Mr. Day’s. Don’t believe what Hartford tells you about all of us being friends. The Fetches were jealous of Nathan. One of them stuck him with a phony spear. Nathan was bleeding. They would have done worse if they caught him, I’m sure.”

“How did they plan to hurt him?” Maddy asked.

Rafferty shrugged. “The usual ways, I suppose.”

“But did they
hurt
him, Paul?” There was a note of desperation in Maddy’s voice.

“We didn’t find him,” Rafferty said. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Something went wrong with the provocation. Nathan got sick. He was dragging his left leg, and his arm was limp. He’d told us early that evening they’d gone numb because of some experiment he’d been undertaking with you, Miss Silverlake. He said his body was not his own.”

“He spoke of me to the Fetches?” I asked.

“Spoke of you often,” Rafferty said, solemnly. “We thought he’d be an easy mark—the way a stag that’s hurt is easy. Alexander Hartford, that buddy of yours in there who’s no proper buddy at all, was the Huntsman General. He kept blowing on his stupid bleeding horn.”

I heard the sound of the horn from my vision—a bright high note in the darkness. The recollection of it made me cold.

“The call of the horn echoed through the theater,” Rafferty said, “and I thought it might bring the whole ceiling down on us. We thought we had him, you know? Nathan was just in front of us—we saw his shadow there with the stag horns and the fur at his shoulders. And Alexander even said something like—
he’s ours, men. The stag is ours
. But once we got around the tree, old Nathan Ashe wasn’t there. He’d—well—he’d disappeared. And there was this odd smell in the air. It reminded me of the time my mother took me down to see the Egyptian mummy at the British Museum. The smell was sweet, but somehow like death.

“Mr. Day told us to light all the lamps ’round the theater. We checked the whole of the forest for him, but Nathan wasn’t there. And the entrance was locked, as it always was when we did a provocation. He couldn’t have gotten out. It didn’t make a bit of sense. And then something surprising happened—Mr. Day got worried. And he’s never gotten worried before, no matter what kind of business we got up to. He said a strange thing to us—that we should all go home and dream Nathan back—as if we could do a thing like that.”

“You’re telling us Nathan disappeared from a locked room?” Maddy asked, too sharply. “That doesn’t make sense, Paul.”

“It’s what happened though,” Rafferty replied.

“Is it possible that Ariston Day did something to him when all of you were off playing the hunt?”

“Anything’s possible,” Rafferty said. “And that place isn’t so
stable,
if you catch my drift. Things are changeable in the theater, sometimes even mad. But I swear that Nathan was behind that tree and then—he just wasn’t.”

“Were there any women in the theater that night?” I asked, thinking of the creature dressed in red who’d pursued the stag in my vision.

“Women?” Rafferty said. “God no. Never in the theater.”

Rafferty walked us back to the carriage, and when he kissed Maddy good-bye, it was a gentle kiss on the cheek, not drunken. Then he kissed me just as lightly, and I wondered if he heard the bricks moaning around us when he touched my skin. As I pulled away, he caught hold of my arm and whispered, “You be careful, Jane Silverlake. Be careful of all of them. Even her.”

And this was as confusing a warning as anything Rafferty could have said. Be careful of Maddy? I wondered again about her revelation to Vidocq. Was it possible that more of the same was on its way?

•   •   •

“What was it Rafferty said to you at the end of our talk?” Maddy asked as we were shuttling back toward Hampstead in her coach.

I thought of telling her the truth but knew it would only serve to make her feel on edge. I said, “He told me you were pretty.”

“Drunken fool,” she said. Ferdinand had climbed onto the bench seat and put his paws on Maddy’s dress. She angrily pushed the dog away. “I don’t believe for a moment Nathan disappeared into thin air from a locked room. There has to be something more.”

“Yes,” I said quietly. “Certainly something more.”

I
was haunted by Rafferty’s description of the hunt and my own experience of the scene. I’d felt the pain and the fear of the stag, and the creature reached out to me, as if it wanted my help. If the creature was actually some astral version of Nathan Ashe, that made things all the worse. I was beginning to fear that the events that had occurred at the provocation were, in some way, connected to my prayers at the field of shale that night.

Again I wished I could remember more of what happened after I’d said my prayers. I closed my eyes and tried to remember. I saw only some sort of red fabric fluttering in the darkness, as if moved by a strong wind. I knew that if my actions had somehow brought harm to Nathan, it was my duty to help him now. It didn’t matter what he and Maddy had done in the southern woods that evening. I’d make my atonement, but first I needed to learn more about what had actually occurred.