Steeplejack (Alternative Detective, #1)(29)

I made the place as safe and accommodating as possible: checked for spiders, flushed the roosting bat out of the shuttered hatch, and lay the baby down in her blankets, my worn-out habbit snuggled next to her—horrified by the scale of my own stupidity. For a long minute I watched her, and when she seemed calm, I left.

The child was safer there than on the streets with me. The day was ending, and every footpad in the city would be on the watch for a Lani steeplejack who had offended Mr. Morlak of Seventh Street.…

Forcing myself to focus on the investigation, I scaled the back of the public library on Winckley Street, waiting in the shadow of a great stone griffin for the newspaper girl’s arrival on the corner below. She dropped from a wagon moments later and set to unloading two pallets of evening papers. I was down, money in hand, in time to be her first customer of the night.

She gave me a curious look but said nothing and handed me the paper. The headline said that the Grappoli ambassador had made a formal protest about the insinuation that his government was in any way associated with the theft of the Beacon. In response, a small crowd had chanted insults outside the embassy till a unit of dragoons dispersed them.

“You can read these as well as sell them?” I asked.

The Mahweni girl bristled. “Every letter,” she returned. “You?”

“Ever heard of Josiah Willinghouse?” I asked.

The question seemed to catch her off guard, but she nodded.

I pocketed my change but left a sixpenny bit on her crate.

She eyed it questioningly and, when I inclined my head a fraction, palmed it. “What do you want to know?” the girl asked, still cautious.

“Anything,” I said. “I expect you read a lot, selling papers all day. I don’t know how much you remember—”

“All of it,” she said.

The boast annoyed me. She caught the look on my face and pushed the coin back across the crate toward me.

I sighed and shoved it back. “Fine,” I said. “You know anything about Willinghouse or not?”

She considered me for a moment, but she wasn’t trying to remember. She was deciding whether to speak. When she did, it came out in an unbroken stream without inflection, and though it was the same voice she always used, her eyes went blank. It felt oddly like someone was speaking through her.

“The Right Honorable Josiah Willinghouse, twenty-four, Brevard party representative for Bar-Selehm Northeast, sits on the Shadow Trade and Industry Committee. Appointed seven months ago. Elected to Parliament three months before that. Currently the youngest serving member. Educated at Ashland University College, Ntuzu, and Smithfield Preparatory School, like his father before him. Son of the late Jeremiah Willinghouse, also member of Parliament for Bar-Selehm Northeast, mining magnate, and Lady Tabitha Farnsworth, also deceased. Josiah Willinghouse’s first parliamentary speech concerned water restrictions at the time of drought and their impact on Mahweni farmers in his district. His motion, which was seconded by Stefan Von Strahden, was denied in a vote along party lines.”

A shiver ran down my spine. “How do you do that?” I asked, all my wary hostility swallowed up by awe.

The girl blinked and suddenly was herself again, though she too had shed her hostility. “I don’t know,” she said, embarrassed by the inadequacy of the remark. “I just remember what I read.”

“It’s extraordinary,” I said.

She flushed and looked away, but there was a flicker of satisfaction in her eyes that she couldn’t conceal.

“What’s your interest in Willinghouse?” she asked. “Or do you just like handsome politicians?”

“Hardly handsome,” I scoffed a little too quickly, so that the girl raised an eyebrow.

“All right,” she said. “Anything else you want to know about?”

“Yes,” I said on impulse. “Ansveld. The luxorite merchant who died.”

“What about him?” she asked, wary again.

“Where did he work?”

“Mr. Thomas Ansveld of Ansveld and Sons Quality Luxorite Emporium, Twenty-two Crommerty Street, Bar-Selehm,” she said automatically and without inflection.

I marveled again. “Have you always been able to do that?” I asked.

“As long as I can remember,” she said. “My father taught me to read, but it was years before I knew that what I could do was … not usual.”

“It’s a gift,” I said, smiling.

The girl looked less sure of that, and a trace of her former stiffness returned. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” she said.

“I mean it. You shouldn’t be selling papers. You should be a reporter.”

Something complex flashed through her face, a bright and incandescent joy quickly doused and smothered. “Right,” she said. “Now, if you don’t mind, I have customers.”

*

I HADN’T LEARNED MUCH, but it felt like a start, and I returned to the Martel Court exhilarated. That feeling was dashed as soon as I climbed up to the louvered shutters of the room above the clock. The baby was crying again. I could hear it like a siren in the air, an awful, accusatory keening.

She calmed a little when I picked her up, but began again when she tried to nuzzle at my breast and found no sustenance. I whispered to her and pushed the habbit into her tiny hands, but nothing helped. She needed her mother, and though she was clearly ravenous, she would not take the milk I had bought earlier.