Images assailed me. Other hands, touching, placing.A bright sky, and a dark chamber hewn in stone. A familiar face with a short moustache, neat sideburns, and the canvas-clad helmet of a soldier. Lewis. My heart startled in my chest, but long practice kept my expression passingly curious.
The object I touched was now discernable as the top of a box. A symbol stared up at me, complex and arcane.
“Miss Fleet, if I may?” Mr. Stoke murmured.
I stepped back. The man took my place and lifted the box from its nest, revealing it to be a perfect cube, its wood pale and sapped of color. Its sides were the length of Mr. Stoke’s large hands and carved with circular symbols, like the top. There was no visible opening, though I noted the suggestion of joints. A puzzle box.
“Well.” Harden looked unimpressed. “If you’re satisfied? I’ve other business to be about.”
Mr. Stoke nodded, shifted the box under one arm and shook Harden’s hand. “A pleasure.”
“’Course,” Harden said. “Glad to help a man such as yourself. You know how to find me if you’ve more such… mutually beneficial opportunities. I’ll be about Harrow from now on. But I can make arrangements.”
Mr. Stoke nodded, touched his hat and made for the door, gathering me with a glance. I fell into step, pulling my glove back on and watching the symbols on the box disappear as the detective wrapped it in cloth.
“The same goes to you, Miss Fleet.”
Harden’s voice made me pause in the doorway. The breezy autumn night swept around me, stirring my skirts and smelling strongly of river, mildew, and coming rain.
Mr. Stoke continued a few steps before he glanced back.
“Pardon?” I looked at the smuggler with blooming irritation, but that shifted to unease as I met his gaze. He did not leer as I expected, but there was assessment in the tilt of his head, and a hint of knowing in his eyes.
“You know how to find me if you’ve any business opportunities,” he clarified. “I’m very good at finding things, as you know. Moving them, discreetly. And hiding them.”
Lewis had most certainly told him too much. I returned the man’s smile, thin and false, and hastened to catch up to Mr. Stoke.
We did not speak as we wove through the series of alleyways and yards back to the main street, both of us sequestered in our thoughts and watching the shadows. We deftly avoided a patrol of city watchmen, standing quietly in the shadow of an awning as they passed, and reached the main street just as church bells began to toll fourth hour.
“Your landlady will not be pleased with me,” Mr. Stoke observed as he glanced up and down the street for a hackney. There were none in sight and by unspoken agreement we began to walk. “Occupying you at such a disagreeable hour.”
“My landlady can stuff it,” I declared. I did not add that, regardless of my bravado, my landlady had begun threatening to lock the doors at midnight, and thus force me to abandon whatever unholy pursuits kept me out at night.
Mr. Stoke frowned. “Perhaps I should speak to her. I can reassure her that you are respectfully employed.”
“Sir, we have, just now, met with a Silver to retrieve antiquities smuggled out of The Sarre. I am unclear how that constitutes respectful employment.”
“We were hired to recover a possession for a respectable council lord,” Mr. Stoke corrected, but there was a hollowness to his tone, and after a moment, he frowned. “Though, I will say, I have had my moments with the morality of this particular endeavor of ours, Miss Fleet.”
He seemed as though he wanted to say more, but the sound of wheels caught our attention. Mr. Stoke stepped out into the street, one arm raised to hail a hackney.
“I will speak to your landlady, Ottilie,” he informed me, shifting back to our original conversation. “You are too dear to me, I will not permit the possibility of seeing you cast out onto the street. Or snoring on my sofa.”
I produced a laugh, but guilt reared again. “Please, there is no need.”
“All the same. Hello, good man.”
The hackney stopped and the driver, a small man with a large hat, greeted us in turn. By the time we settled inside, Mr. Stoke, perhaps noticing my distraction, had set aside the conversation. He sat the bundled box onto the bench beside him, rested his walking stick over his knees, and commenced looking out the window.
Perched across from him with the skirts of my walking suit rumpled, I followed his gaze as the city began to pass by. More people appeared as we left the warehouse district—night workers, drunks, whores, and the displaced. Fires burned in alleyways, surrounded by silhouettes. The public houses were hushed and their windows dim, the boisterous companies of the early night long gone. The lampposts were unlit and neglected, serving as little more than posterboards for chaotic layers of flyers and bills.
And, in the worst of Harrow’s traditions, gallows.
I felt the warmth leech from my face as a crowd came into sight, preceded by the jostling light of torches and lanterns and the clash of voices. The hackney driver bellowed to clear the road, but was largely ignored. Thus the carriage slowed, and Mr. Stoke and I were treated to a clear view of events.
A rope had been tossed up over one of the lamppost’s sturdy arms. At one end, a noose was wrestled around the throat of a wiry woman, her shrieks rising above through the shouts and cheers. Half a dozen men seized the other end, jesting and jostling for the privilege, and before Mr. Stoke could draw breath to shout or I could close my eyes, the rope tightened and the woman swung. Her shrieks abruptly silenced and the crowd roared as she kicked and struggled over their heads.
The hackney sped up, our driver taking advantage of the crowd’s sudden press closer to the dying woman.
