The Red Plague Affair

Chapter Eleven No Tongue Fit For It

Archibald Clare half lay, collapsed in the chair, staring at the grate. The coal burned grudgingly, hushed crackles from the charm drawing its breath up the flue scraping his sensitive ears.

He had spent many an hour here in the comfortable sitting room, conversing with Miss Bannon. The pale wainscoting was an old friend, and the paper above it, with its restful pattern of geometric gilt on sky blue, was particularly fine. The door was flanked by tall narrow tables, each holding a restrained alabaster vase with a plume of snowy ostrich feathers; the carpet was fashioned to seem a twilit pond with water-lily pads scattered thickly across it, clustering in the corners. The furniture, on slim birch stems, gave glimmers of paleness adding to the fancy, and two large water-clear mirrors held soft dancing luminescence in their depths, so the room was never entirely in shadow.

For all that, it was hushed and soothing, and it had the added benefit of being near the front door, so he could hear when Miss Bannon returned.

He had lost track of how long he sat there, staring at the coal as it grew a thick white coat.

The familiarity of the soft vibration running through the walls roused him from his torpor. He had never asked Miss Bannon if every sorcerer’s domicile recognised the return of its inhabitant so joyously, trembling like a well-trained but excited dog. Perhaps he should. Her answer might be instructive, though often her replies clouded the issue rather than clarifying.

How can I explain sorcery logically? Mr Clare, that is akin to asking the deaf to explain music, or a fish to explain dry land. There is no tongue fit for it but that of sorcery itself.

His faculties were wandering. He shook his head slightly, heard the front door’s opening, Mikal’s murmur. No servants hurrying to greet her – would she guess?

“… hear his heartbeat,” Mikal said. He opened the door for her, and a very pale Miss Bannon stalked into the sitting room. Stiff-backed and dry-eyed, she nonetheless looked…

He groped for words, among all those he knew the permutations of. Yes, that was it. That was it precisely.

Emma Bannon looked as if she were weeping without tears.

Clare gained his feet slowly. They regarded each other, and the sorceress’s childlike face grew set and still. And even paler, the delicate blue traceries of veins under her skin showing. A map of fragility, stunning in so iron-willed a personage.

His words did not stumble. “I sent the physicker home. After… Miss Bannon. Emma. You’d best sit down.”

“He is dead, then.” Quiet, each word edged with ice. The coal fire flared, its hissing whisper threading through the sentence. The entire house jolted, as if a train had come to rest, and Clare sighed. His chest pained him slightly, as did his joints.

“The boils burst. It was… there was a great deal of blood, and coagulated matter. Darlington admitted it was quite outside his experience; he was most vexed. The disease… we are not certain it is such, though it seemed…” For quite the first time in his life, Archibald Clare ran short of words, staring at Miss Bannon’s small face.

Not much had changed. A ha’penny’s worth of shifting, perhaps. But it had somehow altered the entire look of her. A pinprick of leprous green flared in each of her pupils, and Clare was suddenly aware of the nips and gnawings of exhaustion all through him. His collar was askew, and his hair was disarranged, and he had failed to roll his sleeves down. Where was his jacket? He no longer remembered.

Miss Bannon, still silent, studied him, rather as an astronomer would peer through a telescope. Her stillness was… uncanny.

“I drew samples.” Clare decided that Eli’s dying screams – Prima! Emma! – were best left undescribed. “The workroom is well-appointed, thank you. And I have examined the bits from your absent genius.” He drew in an endless breath. “I am afraid we may have, erm, rather a problem.”

She was so pale. Even in the midst of the affair with the dragon and a mad Prime, she had never looked thus. The burning coal whispered, mouthing a song of chemical reaction giving birth to heat. The sorceress’s hair rose on a slight breeze from nowhere, curls over her ears stirring gently. Her hat was askew, Clare noted, and that pinprick of vaporous green in her pupils was almost as disturbing. She was normally so fastidious in matters of dress.

He forged onward. “The only conclusion I can draw is that this… illness… is somehow connected to the crusted substance smeared inside the glass canisters. Its source appears to be… Eli had suffered a small cut to his hand from the broken glass, and it is likely the… substance… was introduced. It is perhaps toxic – I took all appropriate caution, mind you, I suspected something of the sort – and, well. This genius Morris, he would not be engaged in manufacturing some manner of poison, would he? The implications are… distressing.” To say the least.

“Poison?” A thin breath of sound. “His hand – a cut from the glass? You are certain?”

“It is the only conclusion I may draw at the moment. It presents very much as an illness, but it cannot be… I do not know.” He searched for something to say. Why was this so difficult? He should be able to present the symptoms, explain his conclusions, and…

The damned angina intensified, but it was all through his chest instead of clustered high on the left. It was not, however, a physical ache. And its source was not his own organs of Feeling, but the look on the sorceress’s face. The frailty of her shoulders, and those glimmers in her eyes. She would not weep, of course. Miss Bannon would not ever allow herself to do such a thing where it could be witnessed.

Perhaps he should have taken a fraction of coja to sharpen him, to make this less… messy.

“His body?” A shadow of her usual brisk tone, but he was heartened by it nonetheless.

“The cellar. Mr Finch said you would wish for it to be placed so.”

“Yes.” A single nod. Her earrings swung, the peridots flashing with far more vigour than the dimness of the room should allow. “Do not.”

Mikal’s hand fell back to his side.

“I am not quite… safe,” Miss Bannon continued, in that same ghostly little voice. “Please do rest, Archibald. I am grateful for your pains in this matter, and I shall be calling upon your services tomorrow. We shall hunt this man, and I am not at all certain he will be returned to the Queen alive.” A slow, leisurely blink, the green pinpricks staying steady though her eyelids closed, and Clare found he had to look away.

It simply was not right for such a thing to be seen.

Miss Bannon turned, sharply, and the house held its breath. She passed through the door like a burning wind, and it swung shut behind her, pulled by an invisible hand. Mikal, a curious expression on his lean face, stared after her.

My Prima has a temper, he had remarked once.

Her footsteps passed down the hall, and she must not have been able to contain her fury. For a single cry rent the nighttime quiet of 34½ Brooke Street, a sound of inhuman rage that would have blasted the house off its foundation had it been physical. It passed through Clare’s skull without bothering to use his ears as a portal, and he staggered. Mikal’s hand closed about his elbow, warm and hard against skin crackling with the dried blood from Eli’s final convulsions, and the Shield steadied him.

“She will tear him to pieces,” the man murmured, almost happily, and Clare was too shaken to enquire whom he meant. It was, in any case, perfectly clear.

The physicker Morris, wherever he was hiding, was about to find there was no hole deep enough to shelter him from Miss Bannon.

Morning rose grey and fretful over Londinium. Tideturn came slightly past dawn, soughing up the Themis’s sparkle and spilling through the streets, filling the city with gold even the unsorcerous could see for a bare few moments.

Clare, roused from slumber by the consciousness of the hour more than by any real desire to be ambulatory, yawned and entered the breakfast room rubbing at his eyes in a decidedly ungentlemanly fashion.

“Guten Morgen, Archie!” Sigmund Baerbarth, round and ruddy as ever, his seamed head a boiled egg’s proud dome, absently waved a teacup, its contents dangerously close to spilling. “I bring you letters.”

“I say, good morning. More mail?” Let me have breakfast first, old man.

Baerbarth’s face was grimed with soot, wiped clean hurriedly, and his fabulous sidewhiskers were tinged with black particles as well. “Serious, yes. Frau Ginn send for me, tell me hurry to you. Is from a man in top hat, she said. Very urgent. He pay her to give to you.”

“Really.” His skin chilled, reflexively. It cannot be. Too soon. “What did he pay?”

“Guinea.” Sig set his teacup down, digging in his capacious pockets. Everything about him was rumpled and grimed with that same black dust.

A guinea, eh? “You have been at your Spinne again, haven’t you.” The huge mechanisterum spider was Baerbarth’s true love, though he was also quite fond of Miss Bannon. Un Eis Mädchen, he called her, and paid her extravagant compliments. Yet he was forever taking the damn Spinne apart and putting it back together, with improvements and refinements.

Even a genius who had failed the notoriously difficult mentath examinations in his own country needed an obsession.

“She works!” Sig crowed, wiping his fingers on his jacket. “Archie, I make her work. She even make steam. Like tiny cloud for her to ride on.” He kissed his blunt fingertips, then dug in his pockets some more. “Ah, here. Urgent letter. Important. But Fräulein Eis Mädchen, she said not to wake dear Archie.”

“Miss Bannon? You’ve seen her this morning?” He accepted the missive – heavy paper, a folded envelope, a wax seal. So soon? Well, well.

“Ja, ja. She go out. All in black. Is in Trauer, the Fräulein?”

Her variety of mourning is likely to be rather difficult for all concerned. “I rather think so, old man.” Clare settled himself, blinking as the rain fingered the windows. Londinium’s yellow fog hunched under the lash of cold water. “Bit of bad business yesterday. Sig, did Mrs Ginn say anything about the gentleman who delivered this? Other than his hat?”

“Fine hat, top hat with feather. Blue coat. Muddy boots.” Sigmund nodded, his poached-egg eyes behind their spectacles swimming a bit. He applied himself to the plate before him, heaped high with viands. Two different kinds of wurst, good plain bangers as well, and eggs. It was a wonder the lot of them didn’t eat Miss Bannon out of house and home. “River mud. Saw it on the steps. Mein Sohn, he bring home mud like that every day.”

Chompton, Baerbarth’s assistant, a lean dark half-feral lad with an affinity for clockhorse gears, mudlarked about in the Themis, scavenging bits of mechanisterum and other things for Baerbarth’s experiments – and to bring a few pennies in for his employer. If not for the young man’s vigilance, Sig would no doubt be cheated of every farthing; the Bavarian was incredibly easy to separate from his coin.

“Ah.” Clare settled himself further in the chair. The breakfast room, blue fabric and cream-painted wicker, was perhaps the most openly womanly of all Miss Bannon’s chambers. He would not have put it past her to have weapons hanging in her boudoir; this and the sunroom were the only concessions to femininity she allowed herself.

The thought of a moment or two spent examining Miss Bannon’s bedroom was extraordinarily pleasing. Such deductions he could make from, say, the shade of her draperies, or the contents of her—

Impolite, Archibald. He busied himself with arranging some provender on his plate. Sig was already snout-down in his own.

The door flung itself open just as Clare lifted the envelope again. Valentinelli stamped in, followed by a ghost-grey, burning-eyed Mikal. Who was dishevelled as he rarely appeared, hair disarranged and his shirt unbuttoned, a strange stippled pattern on his bare chest Clare did not have much time to examine before the man pulled the fabric closed, buttoning swiftly.

How very odd. Burns? No, too regular. I wonder—

“She did not tell me,” the Neapolitan assassin snarled. “La strega go where she pleases. Threaten me again, bastarde. Ludo will answer.”

Wait. Clare’s jaw felt suspiciously loose. “Good God. Miss Bannon left without you?” She did not often do so, and with Eli… well.

The contours of this affair were beginning to take a shape Clare did not quite like.

Mikal cast him a single, venomous yellow glance. “Well before Tideturn. He saw her off.”

“She go out in a carriage, black feathers and hats. Ludo, she say, I do not wish to be followed. Tell Mikal.” His imitation of Miss Bannon’s softly cultured tones was almost uncanny. “I do, and he accuse me of—”

“I do not accuse,” Mikal disputed, hotly, and a galvanic thrill ran through the entire house. The Shield turned on his heel, towards the door, and the betraying twitch in his shoulders told Clare he had been perilously close to sending his fist into the wall.

How intriguing. Clare settled himself to observe what would follow most closely. He was not disappointed, for shortly after, the mistress of the house appeared, her black watered-silk skirts dewed with droplets of gem-glittering rain.

She was in deep mourning, even a crêpe band at her throat holding a fantastic teardrop of green amber, softly glowing with its own inner light. High colour in her cheeks, and the slight untidiness to her hair, bespoke some recent exertion. Her rings were very plain, for once – bands of heavy mellow gold, one on each finger of her delicate, lace-gloved hands. Her earrings, long shivering confections of gold wire and small garnets, made soft chiming sounds as she halted, taking in the breakfast room with one swift glance.

“Good morning, gentlemen.” She sounded exactly as usual, and that was the first surprise.

The second was the breath of sick-sweet smoke overlaying her perfume. Clare’s sensitive nose all but wrinkled; he took careful note of the circles under Miss Bannon’s wide dark eyes and the decided set of her child-soft chin. There was a single tear-track on her cheek, brushed impatiently away, the lace of her glove had scratched and reddened. The redness rimming her eyes as well completed the picture of a woman fiercely determined not to let her grief consume her… but the mourning she wore all but flaunted it.

It was a response he would not have expected. His estimation of her character shifted another few critical degrees. Even after all this time, apparently, she could still surprise him.

Bother. He tucked the letter out of sight as he rose, and Sig dropped the wurst he had speared with a dainty silver fork as he hurried to his feet.

“Guten Morgen, Fräulein.” Sig’s broad beaming smile was a flag. “Lovely, lovely. I bring Archie his mail, and supplies!”

“Thank you, Mr Baerbarth.” Her small answering smile was a ghost of itself. “Ludovico, good morning. Mikal, have you had breakfast?”

“No.” The Shield’s face was a thundercloud. “I was too busy worrying for my Prima.”

“Then by all means, please partake. I shall require you in readiness very shortly. Mr Clare? I have some rather—”

He had the most illogical desire to take her to task. “Have you had breakfast, Miss Bannon?”

The sorceress paused, her head tilted and the drops of rain caught on her dress each glimmering a slightly different shade. “No,” she admitted, finally. “I have not. There were other matters to attend to.” And there still are, her tone said, and that is that.

“I would take it as a kindness if you would join me,” Clare persisted. “I would also take it as a kindness if you accept my services in finding this Mr Morris and bringing him to Her Majesty, as I am now quite intrigued. It is a fascinating puzzle.”

She considered him, and he perceived how carefully Mikal was observing this interchange. Valentinelli, his back to the wall, had his eyebrows drawn together and one hand held oddly low at his side. There was a spark in the Neapolitan’s gaze Clare had not seen in a long while – rather like a cat’s expression as it crouches before a mouse-hole.

“Very well.” Miss Bannon crossed the room with a determined air, her dainty boots click-tapping with their accustomed crispness. He had, Clare reflected, grown quite fond of that sound. “Do sit, gentlemen. Let us have a civilised moment before the day begins.”

Mikal followed her, and Valentinelli peeled himself from the wall. Was it… yes, it was. The Neapolitan appeared slightly disappointed, of all things. What had he expected the sorceress to do?

The letter was a weight in Clare’s pocket. To be caught with two items deserving his faculties was an unexpected gift, and as he settled to breakfast, Miss Bannon sinking gracefully into the chair a silently fuming Mikal held for her, he allowed himself a moment of quiet gloating.

Miss Bannon’s next words, however, gave him much more to think upon.

“As a matter of fact, Mr Clare, I had hoped to see you before I left the house again. Do you think I might borrow dear Ludo from your service? Temporarily, of course.”

“I stand right here, strega. You could ask me.” Ludovico actually bridled, dropping into a wicker chair with a grunt that was only partly theatrical.

“Mr Clare is your employer. Please, do see if you can break another piece of furniture, I rather had the idea of replacing the entire house.”

“If you like, Ludo break everything.” His accent had thickened, and he looked well on his way to as foul a temper as Mikal.

“That will not be necessary, but thank you. I require you for something different today. We shall be visiting a certain sorcerer, and perhaps he will want… convincing, to give us whatever information he possesses.” The smile that settled over her face was chilling in its good-humoured savagery, as unguarded an expression as Clare had ever seen. “And you are so very good at convincing, my bastarde assassino.”

A pained silence descended on the breakfast table. Even Sigmund had ceased his chewing, staring at the sorceress.

Clare coughed, clearing his throat. “Yes, well. Quite. Some tea, Miss Bannon?”

The whip crackled, the matched black clockhorses with their ribbon-braided manes hopped, and Miss Bannon’s carriage jolted onto Brooke Street. The sorceress sat bolt-upright on the hard red cushions, her right index finger tapping occasionally as she stared out of the window, her face set and bloodless.

“Who is this sorcerer?” Clare settled himself more securely – Valentinelli, jostled next to him, looked ill at ease with the sudden motion. Even the best of carriages jolted one about unmercifully, especially when its owner had told her coachman, quickly, please.

Said coachman, Harthell, a wizened nut of a man, was as adept at sailing a carriage through traffic as an experienced sempstress at threading needles. Shouts and curses outside, the carriage yawed alarmingly, then righted itself as the whip cracked again.

“Hm?” She stirred slightly, her hands decorously laid in her black-clad lap. The breath of smoke and roasting on her had faded, and her bergamot perfume was wearing through. It was easy to deduce she had consigned Eli’s body to some form of flame; perhaps it was traditional to do so? Or perhaps it was a hygienic measure? “Oh. His name is Copperpot. He is a Master Alterator; I was at the Collegia this morning and took the liberty of checking the Grand Registry. His address was not quite correct, but there were enough traces at his former residence for me to acquire the location of his new domicile, which Harthell is following a tracer towards. It is quite possible there will be… unpleasantness.”

Oh dear. “Dare I ask what manner of unpleasantness?”

“The usual manner, when we are hunting a conspiracy. The quarter I received information from about Mr Morris had some dark hints, and he has quit his hotel. Perhaps he returned to his employment overseas, the better to avoid any further questioning.”

“Ah.” Clare absorbed this. “So, blood, screaming, and sorcery. And Signor Valentinelli here…”

“Is to convince the sorcerer to tell all he knows.” Valentinelli’s grin was wolfish. He now looked supremely happy, even jolted and tossed as they were. “And even things he does not think he know, he will tell.”

“Quite. I do not wish him dead until he has told all he knows, and I do not wish to question his shade, as such an operation takes precious time we may not have.” Her lips compressed, and Clare’s faculties woke and stretched more fully, inferences from her choice of words turning the picture several shades darker and more complex. “There are other considerations, as well.”

Oh, you are never boring, my dear Emma. “I see.”

“Good. By the way, Clare, you did not show dear little Sigmund the items from Mr Morris’s home, did you?”

“Of course not. Sig would be of no use in… ah. I see.”

“Precisely.” Her hands clasped each other now, the lace digging and scratching as her fingers tensed, and she had gone quite pale. “I believe the fewer people who know of this affair, even in our small circle, the better.”

“Good heavens.” He could feel the blood draining from his own cheeks. “Surely you don’t think Sigmund—”

“Of course not.” Irritated now, she made a small gesture, easing her shoulders inside her dress, leaning into the rattling turn. “I merely wish him to be… safe. He did not see Eli’s… well. We witnessed an event that no doubt has grave consequences. Mr Baerbarth does not need to be party to those consequences.” Another pause. “Ah. We have arrived. Come, gentlemen.”