They ran, fighting their way out of the shrieking wings and pounding down the alley. Bartholomew threw a glance back over his shoulder just in time to see the tall form of the lady in plum sweeping out of the blackness. Her face, half hidden in the shadow of her hat, turned toward him. Then he was around the corner, running with all his might after Mr. Jelliby.
“Why are we running?” Mr. Jelliby yelled as they dashed across a little court, under the branches of a gnarled old tree. “Changeling, what were those wings? What is happening?”
“The lady,” Bartholomew gasped, trying to keep up. “The lady in plum! She’s back, and she wouldn’t come for noth-”
I know you’re here, a dark voice said, sliding silken into his head. Child Number Ten, I can feel you.
A searing pain exploded in Bartholomew’s arms, tracing like the tip of a knife along his skin. He almost collapsed in his tracks.
“The lady in plum?” demanded Mr. Jelliby, stopping short.
Bartholomew collided with his back. Wrenching up a sleeve of his cloak, he saw that the red lines were swollen, raised, pulsating with a ruddy light.
You are running, half-blood, the voice said, mildly surprised. Why do you run? Are you afraid of something? A snicker echoed in Bartholomew’s skull. Surely you don’t have something to hide from me.
“But that’s excellent!” Mr. Jelliby was saying. “I’ve been searching for her for weeks! And your sister is with her, you said! I must speak to her at once.” He gave a resolute stamp and turned on his heel.
Bartholomew ran full force at Mr. Jelliby, shoving him into a doorway. “You don’t understand,” he said, gritting his teeth against the pain in his arms. “She’s not the same all the time. She does dreadful things. Don’t you see, she’s the murderer!”
Mr. Jelliby frowned down at him. “She asked for my help,” he said. Then he shook Bartholomew off and began walking back the way he had come, shouting, “Miss! Oh, miss!”
“You can’t do this!” Bartholomew cried frantically, running after him. But it was too late.
A gust of black wings filled the mouth of the street and there was the lady in plum, velvet skirts swirling around her. Something twitched under her skin when she caught sight of Mr. Jelliby. Something like a tiny snake wriggling through bone and sinew.
“You,” the voice said, and this time it was not only in Bartholomew’s head. It slithered up among the houses, prickled in his ears. The lady began to move.
“Miss!” Mr. Jelliby called. “Miss, I must speak with you on a matter of great urgency! You asked for my help, remember? In Westminster? I was in the cupboard and you-”
The lady did not slow down. Lifting one blue-gloved finger, she slashed it viciously through the air in front of her. Mr. Jelliby was swept off his feet and hurled against the wall. Bartholomew spun back into the doorway just as something like a swarm of invisible birds rushed past his face.
“How did you survive?” the voice spat at Mr. Jelliby. The lady’s finger was still pointing at him, pinning him to the wall. His feet dangled several strides above the cobblestones. “Why are you still alive? No one has ever survived that magic before!” Mr. Jelliby began to gag, his hands clawing at his collar.
Quickly and stealthily, Bartholomew crept out of the doorway and pried a loose cobblestone out of the street. Then he moved toward the lady’s back, weapon raised.
There was a warning cry. The lady reached behind her head and parted her hair. Mr. Jelliby crumpled to the ground. Bartholomew froze.
The other face, the tiny leathery one, was looking straight at him, its eyes glittering points inside the folds of flesh. Thick brown tentacles writhed through the lady’s hair. It opened its mouth in a sneer.
“Child Number Ten,” it said. “The boy in the window.” Bartholomew hurled the cobblestone.
A howl of pain tore through the alley, so loud it sent a flock of jackdaws wheeling into the sky. The lady raised three fingers, no doubt to finish them both off, once and for all, but Bartholomew was already running, skidding around the corner at Mr. Jelliby’s heels.
The next alley was wider. Bartholomew had the briefest impression of people stopping their business to stare at them, a casement banging open, a butcher shop with offal running black into the gutter. Then they were out in the open again, out among the rattling trams and the crowds. Washing blew in the breeze overhead. The air was full of smoke and voices. Bartholomew thought he smelled boiled turnips, just like in the upstairs of their house in Old Crow Alley.
“We have to get to the train station!” Mr. Jelliby shouted, shoving his way between a peppermint-water seller and a faery with mouths where its eyes should have been. “Keep watch for a rickshaw, boy. There should be a blue chap somewhere hereabouts.”
Bartholomew peered out from between the strips of fabric. All around he saw nothing but legs. Legs in suits, legs in rags, legs in cotton, gray and dove colors, hurrying in every direction. So many people. The thought was accompanied by a stab of panic. Don’t get yourself noticed. Don’t let them see. They were all around, fingers and eyes so close and dangerous. And then, among the legs, he spotted a flicker of purple; plum-colored velvet clutched in a midnight-blue hand.
“She’s here,” Bartholomew hissed to Mr. Jelliby.
Mr. Jelliby stole a glance over his shoulder. Sure enough, there was the lady in plum, advancing steadily through the crowds. She stood a head above the endless flow of drab coats and hats, her shadowed face fixed. Stiff as a marionette she walked, no more than twenty paces behind them, and the gap was closing swiftly.
Without a word Bartholomew and Mr. Jelliby slipped into a doorway and down a gray stone passage that looked out over a vegetable garden. The passage led into a bustling kitchen and then out again into a narrow shop-lined street. They paused to get their bearings.
“Why does she want to kill me?” Mr. Jelliby said, halfway between a whisper and a shout. He was turning circles on the cobbles, running his fingers through his hair. “She asked for my help! My help, for goodness’ sake! And now that I’ve finally found her she very well near murders me!”
Birds croaked along the roof gutter. Bartholomew was trying to find a way to lace up his boots.
“She asked for your help, did she?”
It was not Bartholomew who had spoken. Mr. Jelliby spun. There, not six steps away, stood the lady in plum, lips unmoving in her face. Slowly, she began to turn. The second face came into view, leering out at them through a curtain of hair. Black liquid dribbled down its chin from a horrid gash across its mouth.
“Melusine, you little traitor.” The voice was sickly sweet, but it shook, a razor thread close to snapping.
Mr. Jelliby gaped at the face. It stared back, cracked lips trembling, little black eyes twitching like beetles.
Bartholomew saw his chance. Sidestepping into the kitchen, he began to run again.
Mr. Jelliby watched him go, and his heart sank. There’s the gratitude for my charity, he thought bitterly. The little devil boy’s abandoned me. And then the lady in plum lifted a dainty finger, and Mr. Jelliby was swept off his feet and hurled across the street.
He smashed through a shoemaker’s window into the closed-up shop behind it. For an instant he floated in the center of the room, surrounded by boots and darkness. Then he was dragged out again, back across the street, smashing into a door so hard the metal studs split his skin.
Something snagged the fabric of his coat and rent it side to side. A shard of glass caught him in the hand. He saw the droplets of blood fly down through the air, ruby-red and glistening.
This was the end, then. The thought came to him idly as his head rapped against a painted signboard. This was the end. He would die now.
But something was happening in the street below. He heard commotion, a flurry of feet on the cobbles, followed by the desperate shout of, “There she is! Help him! Help him, she’s going to murder him!”
Boy? He forced himself to open his eyes. He was about eight feet above the ground, tangled in the metalwork of a blacksmith’s sign. Below, two uniformed officers stood, looking from him to the lady in plum and back again with the most befuddled expressions on their mustached faces. Their confusion seemed to last an eternity. Then they ran at the lady, arms outstretched, prepared to snatch her up like a child.
The lady in plum did not even flinch. Still holding Mr. Jelliby suspended with one hand, she swept the other one about and pointed it, palm outward, at one of the policemen. His face flattened, as if against glass, and he reeled back, clutching his nose. The other one was almost upon her when he too stopped short. He began marching like a wind-up soldier and walked straight into a wall.
Mr. Jelliby was airborne again. Something had pulled him from the sign, and he was flying, the howl of wings and wind filling his ears. He was dragged as high as the rooftops, then dropped, then snatched up again inches before he smashed to the cobbles. He swooped past the lady. His fingers brushed hair and shriveled skin.
He had only a split second. A split second to think and even less to strike, but he did. His fist caught the little face in the mouth. The lady in plum went reeling forward, and suddenly nothing was holding Mr. Jelliby anymore and he plummeted.
A frightful, pain-filled wheezing filled the alley. Mr. Jelliby collapsed into the gutter, and the wheezing went on and on, scratching at the inside of his bones. The lady began to whirl like a dancer on a stage. The edges of her skirt and the tips of her fingers were turning to black feathers, glistening and sparkling in the light. Then the officer with the bloody nose leaped toward her and seized her. The two figures struggled, black wings pouring around them. The lady shrieked and thrashed, but it was no use. The flapping weakened. And all in an instant it was over. The wings were gone. The rushing wind as well. The street became utterly still.
Bartholomew, the lady, the officers, all stood as if turned to stone. Then the noise of the city enveloped them. Shouts and steam horns-warm, familiar sounds.
The police were the first to move. They clapped metal cuffs across the lady’s wrists, and one of them began leading her away.
Mr. Jelliby crawled out of the gutter, aching and winded. Bartholomew made a move to disappear down the stone passageway, back into the close-packed crowds of the wider street, but the other officer caught him by the hood of his cloak.
“We’re not finished with you, hobgoblin. And I’m afraid with you neither, sir. It looks like we’ll all be taking a pleasant jaunt down to the station.”
The Bath Police of precinct eight were established in a squat brick building directly below the smoke and falling sparks of an iron bridge that vaulted up into the new city. The windows were sooty, the floors unswept, and everything from the file cabinets to the lampshades smelled strongly of opium.
Bartholomew and Mr. Jelliby were made to sit down in a cold little office, in the presence of an incessantly scowling secretary. Mr. Jelliby’s head flopped about now and again, and Bartholomew was afraid he might tip forward onto the floor. After a long while, a young woman in a red-and-white cap came in and bound up all Mr. Jelliby’s various wounds in clean gauze. She was cheerful enough to him, but she looked at Bartholomew nervously and always pulled her apron a little tighter around herself when she moved within reach, as if she were afraid Bartholomew was going to pluck at it. After a time, she left again. They waited another age. The secretary scowled at them. An old metal clock hung on the wall, and its clacking hands seemed to slow time down rather than count it.
Bartholomew’s foot tapped the floor. He wanted to move, to get out of the building and run until he found Hettie. How much time do I have? Not long. Not long before she was like the other changelings, quiet and dead. He saw her in the water suddenly. A white shape bobbing in the dark. Her branches wilted, limp in the currents. Hettie. Bartholomew pinched his eyes shut.
“Thank you for coming back for me,” Mr. Jelliby said suddenly, and Bartholomew jumped a little. The man hadn’t raised his head. His eyes were still shut. Bartholomew didn’t know what to say. For a long moment he just sat there, trying to think of something, anything at all. Then the door burst open and an inspector came in, and Bartholomew wished he could sink into the shadows of his cloak and never be seen.
The inspector began asking Mr. Jelliby a great many questions. Mr. Jelliby was tempted to tell him everything. All about Mr. Lickerish, and the changeling murders, and the clockwork birds. Then they could handle it. They could do all this. But he knew it wouldn’t do any good. Mr. Zerubbabel hadn’t believed him. Not even Ophelia had believed him.
Once the inspector had convinced himself that Mr. Jelliby knew very little about anything at all, he too left and was replaced by a small bearded man in a tweed coat. The man was very plain. His face was plain, his bald head was plain, and his wrinkled necktie was plain. All but his eyes, which were a startling, frigid blue, like glacier water. It looked as if he wanted to eat you up with them.
“Good day,” he said. His voice was soft. “I am Dr. Harrow, head of Sidhe studies at Bradford College. The lady who attacked you today is possessed by one. A faery, that is, not a college. Now. If you would be so kind as to recount to me every detail you can remember of her actions, her re-actions, the sound of her voice, and the character of her thaumaturgic abilities, I would be much obliged.”
Mr. Jelliby nodded glumly from under his bandages and began a lengthy description of being attacked and pursued and thrown about alleyways. Then, when he thought he might dare, he asked, “Might I be allowed to speak with her? Is it safe? I’m sure I’d only need a moment.”
Dr. Harrow looked doubtful. “You say you do not know her at all?”
“Oh, I don’t,” Mr. Jelliby assured him hurriedly. “I’d. . just like to ask her something, if that’s all right.”
“And that is a gnome?” the doctor asked, pointing a thumb toward Bartholomew. “He will have to stay out. They are likely to plot together by magic.”
Mr. Jelliby hadn’t thought of that. “Very well,” he said. “I’ll be back shortly, boy.”
Dr. Harrow motioned for Mr. Jelliby to follow, and the two of them went out into a corridor and down a flight of metal stairs. At the foot of the stairs was another corridor, but this one was low and vaulted, with whitewashed walls and a green tile floor. Thick iron doors lined both sides. The smell of lye soap and carbolic soda hung in the air, so strong it burned in Mr. Jelliby’s nostrils, and yet even that wasn’t able to cover the stench of filthy humans and faeries.
The doctor led him to one of the doors and motioned the guard who sat at the far end of the passage to unlock it.
They were shown into a stark white room. It had no windows, no comforts at all. Its only furnishing was a plain wooden chair in the center of the floor. And seated on it, dark and still, was the lady in plum.
The gloves had been pulled from her hands so that her fingerprints could be taken. Parts of her dress had been cut away. Her hat was still in place, though, hiding her eyes.
“The faery inhabiting her is some sort of leeching faery,” the doctor explained, circling her. “A parasite. Such cases are extraordinary. Usually the parasite will take over the consciousness of an animal or a tree. That it should attach itself in such a way to a human is almost unheard of. According to Spense, once the parasite has infiltrated its host, it begins to slowly consume it. The leeching faery takes over the mind, worms into flesh and sinew. . ” He pulled aside the locks of hair at the back of her head, revealing the twisted, mangled face underneath. “Only the voice box is said to be impossible to control. So beware, should you ever cross paths with a silent cow.” The doctor tittered at his own joke.
The face beneath the hair was the ugliest thing Mr. Jelliby had ever seen. Not human, barely fay, a sagging mass of teeth and tentacles and wrinkled skin. Its mouth hung open. Its eyes were shut, almost hidden under the swelling wound from Bartholomew’s cobblestone.
“The faery is under a powerful sedative,” Dr. Harrow said, letting the hair fall back. “By the looks of things it has been inhabiting the lady for many months. It is rooted very deeply. Anything it eats or feels will to some extent affect her as well. She will be drowsy. I doubt she will be able to tell you anything useful.”
Mr. Jelliby nodded. Kneeling down so that he could see under her hat, he said, “Miss? Miss, can you hear me?”
There was no response. She sat there, a dark statue upon the chair, and did not stir.
Mr. Jelliby looked over his shoulder at the doctor. “Consumed her, you say? Will she live? Can’t the faery be. . extricated somehow?”
“Surgically perhaps,” Dr. Harrow answered coolly. “But I do not know if she will ever fully recover, if her mind will ever work on its own again, or her limbs follow her own directions. It is very doubtful.”
Mr. Jelliby turned back to the lady, his face grave. “Melusine?” he said quietly.
This time her eyelids flickered open. The eyes underneath were dead-black, glistening.
He breathed in sharply. “Melusine, you asked for my help, do you remember?” The words came quickly and quietly. “I don’t know if I have helped you at all. I hope you will be safe here. But in truth I am the one in desperate need of your help. Do you remember anything of the past few months? Where you were? What you did? Melusine?”
She continued to stare straight ahead.
“I need you to remember,” he whispered. “Could you try?” Behind him the doctor was frowning, one hand on the alarm bell. “Anything! Anything at all!”
Something shifted in her eyes then, a change behind the mask of her face. Her mouth opened. She sighed a long, drowsy sigh.
“There was a hallway,” she said. It was so sudden it made Mr. Jelliby start. “A hallway into the Moon.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Mr. Jelliby thought he saw something. A mass of dark, swarming along the white wall.
“I was hurrying down it,” the lady went on. “Searching for something. And there was someone behind me. . standing. . staring after me.”
Mr. Jelliby glanced at the wall. Nothing there. He stood, turning his back on the lady. “That was me in the hallway,” he said quietly. “In Nonsuch House. It was not the moon.” Her mind was quite gone. She would be no help to him.
“I’ll be going now,” he said, addressing Dr. Harrow. “My utmost gratitude for your time.”
The bearded man gave a small bow. “Oh, not at all,” he said, and his blue eyes gleamed with a strange light. “Not. . at. . all.” With a flourish, he opened the door to the cell and held it for Mr. Jelliby to step through.
Mr. Jelliby smiled weakly. He walked toward the door. But just as he was crossing the threshold, he spun. His fist flew up and he struck the doctor square between the eyes. Then he bolted down the corridor.
“Boy?” he cried, knocking aside the guard and hurtling up the stairs. “Boy, get out of here!”
Dr. Harrow’s lips: they hadn’t moved.