Then an orange light spilled out from under the door and the heavy locks were unlocking, one by one, and the deputy was calling out in a cheerful voice, “Hiya, boy, looks like you ain’t leaving us so soon after all,” and then the door was swinging wide, and for a moment it blocked Alice’s view so that she couldn’t see Ovid, couldn’t see the deputy as he shuffled in, could only see the fall of the lantern light and hear the man grunt in surprise and then there was a clatter of something falling and the lantern smashing to the floor and then darkness.
Alice was around the door at once, fists doubled, but the deputy was already dead. The blade was deep in his neck. Ovid stared down at him.
“Goddamnit,” she swore. “What was that?”
But Coulton was unfazed. “Let me see that, son.” He grabbed Ovid by the wrist and turned his arm this way and that until the boy pulled away.
The boy kneeled over the dead man and pulled the blade free from the body with a sucking noise and he wiped it on his own trousers and then he slid it inside his shirt for the keeping. “Why’d you come back for me?” he whispered. His gestures were calm but his voice sounded shaken.
Alice, still stunned, didn’t know what to say. “Because it’s our job,” she said at last. “And because no one else was going to.”
“You shouldn’t have.”
“Why not?”
“I wouldn’t have.”
“We don’t have time for this,” Coulton interrupted. “Riverboat leaves in fifteen minutes. We got to go.”
Alice held the boy’s eye for a long quiet moment. “Maybe someday you will,” she said. “Maybe someday there’ll be somebody to go back for.”
Coulton was already taking off his greatcoat, handing across his bowler. Ovid looked ridiculous in the clothing, far too tall for it, Alice thought, but there was nothing to be done about it. Alice pulled off the deputy’s boots and Ovid put them on. They needed to keep to the shadows and pray for quiet streets. Alice figured they would have maybe ten minutes at most before the deputy’s absence was noticed and someone came looking. She tugged at the sleeves of the greatcoat for the boy and she buttoned it fast over his bloodied shirt and she turned up the collar and she grunted.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”
Coulton waved them forward. They hurried through the warehouse and back outside into the moonlit street, then slid along the silvering wall and down toward the river. The air felt clean, impossibly good to Alice, after the close reek of the warehouse cell. She was trying not to think of what she had just seen, of the boy and his forearm, the blade buried in it. Trying and failing.
At the river wharf Alice could see the big paddle steamer lit up over the water, the water reflecting the shine, the men quietly moving around below with the freight and the ropes. Coulton led them up a long ramp and into a little ticketing house, and there he spoke in low tones to a man behind the counter, and after a few minutes they hurried back out and up the gangway to the steamer. Ovid had his hat pulled low and his collar high and his hands thrust into the greatcoat pockets but he was still, to Alice’s eye, clearly a black kid, absurd in his big empty boots and too-short clothes. But whatever arrangements Coulton had made worked; no one stopped them; and within a few minutes they were on board the paddleboat and following a porter down a corridor to their staterooms and then they heard the shouting of the workers below, and the ropes were cast off, and the paddle steamer pulled slowly, powerfully, out into the currents of the dark Mississippi.
* * *
She and Coulton ate a late dinner on the riverboat, the only two dining so.
They had left the boy Ovid in Coulton’s cabin, pretending to sleep, his wrists unbound, in the belief he would not trust them if they did not trust him first. In the saloon the gaslights were turned low, the paddle whumping faintly in the darkness beyond. A black waiter leaned against the brass railing of the bar watching them in the mirror. Coulton chewed his steak in small bites, stacking his cheeks with potatoes and gravy. Alice had little appetite.
“Did you know?” she asked. “Did you know he could do that?”
Coulton held her eye. “I did not,” he said softly.
She was shaking her head. “That deputy tried to explain it. He tried to tell us.”
“These kids, these orphans. They’re none of them normal. It doesn’t make them monsters.”
She thought about it. “Doesn’t it though?” She looked up. “Isn’t that exactly what it makes them?”
“No,” he said firmly.
She sat with her hands folded in her lap and stared at her plate. It was true, there was about all of them, all of those orphans, something strange, unaccountable, not to be talked about by her or by Coulton. Wisps of rumor followed them out of their old lives.
“He could’ve got away at any time,” she said then, in a slow voice. “He had a knife inside him. The whole time. Why didn’t he try to run before?” She looked up. She thought of how unsurprised Coulton had been back in the cell and she felt suddenly foolish, like she’d been lied to. “What exactly is the Cairndale Institute, Mr. Coulton? And don’t tell me these children are afflicted. Who is it I’m working for?”
“We’re the good guys,” he said quietly.
“Sure.”
“We are.”
“Everyone thinks they’re the good guys.”
But Coulton was serious. He smoothed the stray hairs over his scalp, frowning. “I told Mrs. Harrogate, before we left, that you ought to know more. She wasn’t certain you were … committed. But I reckon it’s time. You just keep your questions clear in your own head, and you can ask her yourself, when you’re back in London.”
“She wants to meet with me?”
“Aye.”
Alice was surprised; she’d met her employer only the once. But she was satisfied with that. She picked up her fork and knife. “I don’t know how you stand it,” she said, changing the subject. “These people. That judge. I’d have thrown him out of his own damn window.”
“What good would that have done us?”
“It’d have done me good.”
“I know this world some, Miss Quicke. Here courtesy is more important than truth. More important than being right.”
She thought of the boy in rags, shivering in that warehouse. “Courtesy,” she muttered.
“Aye.” Coulton gave her a grin. “That’s maybe a tricky one for you.”
“I can be courteous.”
“Sure.”
“What? I can.”
Coulton paused in his chewing. He swallowed and took a drink of wine and then he wiped at his mouth and met her eye. “I never in my entire life met a person more like a boil on a baker’s bright red backside than you, Alice Quicke. And I mean that in the nicest way possible.” He reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a small folded slip of paper. “Messenger lad delivered this to the hotel,” he said, chewing again. “New assignment. Name’s Marlowe. You’re to go to the Beecher and Fox Circus in Remington, Illinois.”
“Remington.”
“Aye.”
“My mother’s asylum’s in Remington. Or just outside it.”
Coulton watched her. “Is it a problem?”
She hesitated, then shook her head. “It’ll be fine. It’s just the wrong end of the backside, is all.” She paused. “Wait. I’m to go? You’re not coming?”
“I’ll be escorting the Ovid boy back to London.” Coulton withdrew a new envelope from his pocket. “There’s a ticket in here for a riverboat to St. Louis, sailing at first light. Don’t worry, it doesn’t put in at Natchez. You’ll take the railway up to Remington. You’ll also find some testimonials I’ve taken the liberty of writing out for you, documents and the like. Also the address in London where you’ll find Mrs. Harrogate. Wire her directly, if anything comes up. Also some bills to cover expenses, also two second-class tickets for a steamer out of New York in eighteen days’ time.” He took another bite of his steak. “And an account of how this Marlowe lad was stolen by his nursemaid as a babe and ferreted out of England, and how his family has hired you to track him down, et cetera et cetera.”
She glanced through the papers. “There’s an identifying mark?”
“A birthmark. Aye.”
“That’s unusual.”
He nodded.
“How much of this is true?”
“Some. Enough.”
“But he’s just another orphan?”
“Aye.”
“As long as I don’t get there and find him pulling things out of his fucking arms.”
Coulton smiled.