Jane Steele(91)
I did not achieve a second smile, but the set of his lips did grow a shade less alarmed.
Clasping my hand, he said, “In that case, farewell, Miss Jane Stone, and send us word of your whereabouts at once. Should you ever wish to trade the name Jane Stone for Jane Kaur, however, you should make a wise and courageous Sikh princess, and must return to us immediately. I beg you to consider it—the return, at least, if not the new moniker.”
Walking towards the coach was like pulling my own skin off, but Mr. Singh helped by stepping back courteously.
“Keep them safe,” I called when I reached the tall step. “Parting from you, from Sahjara, from Mr. Thornfield—well, the poets are liars. It isn’t sweet sorrow at all, it’s like dying a little.”
Mr. Singh turned towards the half-timbered hostelry and Mr. Thornfield’s waiting carriage. “So often the way,” he agreed sombrely, “with partings.”
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My journey to London was a clanking, frigid stretch of dull farms and weathered church spires during which none of the other passengers so much as snored in my direction. When I at last arrived in the city, still shaking from the road’s vibrations as well as nerves, I knew myself too sensible simply to crawl to a low lodging-house in Drury Lane and forget the sour bedclothes with the help of a pint of rum; so I walked for a few miles, stopping before the door of a seedy theatre for a ham sandwich with mustard and a tin cup of coffee.
Restored, I recalled a guesthouse called the Weathercock in Orchard Street, Westminster, where I had lived for a few weeks high on the hog with the best-paid and best-educated literary patterers. As I was already near Marylebone, travelling there by foot would be easy as blinking, so I thanked the sandwich man and set off.
All was as I remembered it, a pretty white-painted building with gas lamps aglow at either side of the broad front steps, and men of letters guffawing over politics in the lobby. When I rang the bell, the clerk expressed dismay at my lack of luggage; however, as I had the commodities of both tears and money at the ready, pleading railway thieves, I had soon obtained his sympathies, and he vowed to send the boots round for toiletries, laudanum (my pate ached something terrible, as did my heart), and a packet of tooth powder.
The Weathercock had a lending library for the consideration of 1d. per week, to be paid upon Sundays, but I further endeared myself to the establishment by paying for this privilege immediately, made a selection based upon the volume having slipped down against its cohorts in a defeated diagonal posture, and took a glass of hot brandy and lemon to my room.
After a desolate time spent nursing that toddy—though no tears, for the rest of them had taken up residence in Mr. Singh’s coat—I had produced a plan of action. This was three-pronged, and intended the following goals be achieved:
—Remove all threat from the lives endangered by Augustus P. Sack
—Ascertain whether you are the heiress of Highgate House
—Escape the clutches of Mr. Sam Quillfeather and avoid the noose
Penning this last, I shivered. Inspector Quillfeather may well have forgot everything, may well have indulged his friend Charles Thornfield, may well even have wanted to see the corpse before leaping to conclusions; but I had witnessed his absolute recognition of me, had heard him suggest I must have been a widow in a polite effort to explain why he was addressing a Stone and not a Steele. Sam Quillfeather was decorous and might even be kind; Sam Quillfeather was not stupid, however, and he had just examined the body of yet another chap slaughtered by my hands.
By my calculation, knowing where I stood upon these matters now that I had vanished would take me no more than a fortnight; resolving them, no more than a few months. I had enough money to live for some two years with only the hundred pounds Mr. Thornfield bestowed, provided I practised economy, and meanwhile the boots had delivered a fresh evening edition to my room with my other requests, and the paper was chock-full of executions. With hard work added to the formula, it would be enough; I might linger here, and so bury myself in projects that no one should see I was transparent by daylight, a ghost with a soul of smoke and secrets.
Once resolved, I picked up the edition I had selected upon a whim, and began the novel.
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. . . .
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It will seem peculiar to the reader, doubtless, but I awoke to my exile feeling much refreshed the next morning.
After all, I had a set of purposes; the frenzy of fright I had been driven into by the reappearance of Sam Quillfeather was quite dampened here in the world’s greatest cesspool; and the daily agony of seeing Charles Thornfield as if through a glass case in a museum display had ended. Additionally, London crackles and buzzes; it spits and it decays and it shines. I had missed it without knowing, so engrossed had I been by my new companions, but now I felt afresh the energy a metropolis can infuse into its strivers.
The first thing to be done was to purchase new—by which I mean secondhand, but far more opulent—togs, which would further two out of my three schemes.
I obtained a glass of porter and a good penny plate of bread and fried haddock at a pub first, and then took a crowded omnibus towards Aldgate. Far from Highgate House, my abandoned frocks were recalled as spinsterish and depressing rather than merely dull, for I had never dressed so in the city; I had sometimes been destitute and never wealthy, but it must have been my French half insisting upon the richest plaid capes despite their threadbare edges, the daintiest buttoned boots.