“Not at all, miss.” Hopgood rested a hand on the balcony door. “If you’ll come with me, I’ll let him explain.”
Constable Hopgood lived in a narrow house not far from my own apartments, on an island in the river. There was little left of the island itself—it was encased in stone. Stone streets, stone houses, stone walls. It was picturesque, with an air of crowded community, but frequently flooded in the spring, and had thus been left to the lower middle-class.
The streets were unnervingly quiet as we went, save for the cry of gulls over the river. We saw only other lawmen and soldiers, and it was obvious from the short words the uniformed Hopgood exchanged with them that if I had been alone, I would have been forcibly removed from the streets.
“I need to understand,” I prompted in a stretch of privacy, unable to articulate a more pointed question. I had too many of them. “What happened to Mr. Stoke?”
“He turned up in Farfleet Hospital yesterday, on the west bank,” Hopgood said. “He had been unconscious in their care for several days, and reached out to me as soon as he awoke.”
I had Hieronymus with me, in a carpet bag for lack of the wicker cage I had never bought, and his irritated mews came through the patterned fabric as I processed this. “Then the body you found was not him, just made to look like him?”
“Yes. It was Lord Stillwell’s original messenger, his valet. Mr. Wake threatened the man into hiding, whereupon heconnected with Mr. Stoke, who’d also gone to ground. Mr. Wake tracked down the pair of them. Mr. Stoke shot Mr. Wake, and Mr. Wake killed Stillwell’s man to save himself—Leeching, as we suspected. Stoke saw an opportunity to falsify his death, and took it.”
“But what good would that do, if Wake knew Mr. Stoke was not the man he killed?”
“Mr. Stoke was in no good condition himself. He was looking to buy days, hours even, and never expected the façade to hold up to scrutiny. He was not just hiding from Mr. Wake, you see, but the Guild. Anyhow, his wounds took their toll, and he was found and taken to Farfleet, unnamed and unconscious.”
I recalled Mr. Wake’s tale of running into Mr. Stoke as he fled a third, unknown party. “By the Guild, do you mean a Starlit mage, Everard Moran?”
“A Starlight, yes,” Hopgood affirmed.
Moran, who had learned of Stoke’s connection to the artifact through Lewis’s and my letters.
I scrubbed at my forehead, overwhelmed. In my carpet bag, Ronny mewed.
“I should let him finish the tale, miss,” Hopgood said. We had reached the riverbank, exposed and windy, and his guard visibly rose. “Let’s pick up our feet.”
I nodded, hurrying along at his side. The day was grey and dismal and the wind that buffeted us smelled of river, smoke, and rain. No one else was about save a military vehicle, prowling across an intersecting street.
Up ahead of us, an old military bastion blocked our view down the boardwalk, keeping its silent, stoic vigil over the city. Great clouds of gulls wheeled from its ramparts, their cries jarring in the general hush.
I eyed the gulls warily as we passed around the bastion and were granted full view of the riverbank once more.
Bodies hung from every lamppost down the grand, open boardwalk. They swung, swollen-faced and limp—men and women, in skirts and trousers, booted and barefoot. Gulls and other scavenging birds swarmed, shrieking and hoppingbackwards, exploding into disgruntled clouds as soldiers with a cart made their way unhurriedly along, cutting the corpses down.
“Stop, there!” It took several shouts of this before the words penetrated my skull. A group of four soldiers made to intercept Hopgood and I.
“Let me talk,” Hopgood muttered.
“Constable, who is this?” one of the soldiers asked. He was evidently an officer, from his bars and mannerism, and the way he looked at me made my sore muscles tense for flight.
Stretched out before us, the bodies of dead Entwined Affinates swung listlessly. Gulls swooped. A soldier hacked ineptly at a rope, making the corpse of a white-haired woman shudder.
“I am escorting this woman home, sir. Found her hiding in an alleyway,” Hopgood lied flawlessly.
“What is your name and why were you on the street?” the officer asked. From the way he searched my face, I sensed something more to the interrogation. Baffin’s people would be looking for me, after all.
From my carpet bag came a piteous mewling. “Mrs. Emmet Fowling, Dorothy Fowling,” I said, lying as easily as Hopgood, with an appropriate quaver and nervousness and shame. “My daughter’s cat. He went missing—she’s been beside herself, sir.”
“The city is at war, Mrs. Fowling. Would you rather your child had a mother or a cat?”
I looked down.
“I’ve spoken to her quite forcefully, Captain,” Hopgood assured with a confiding air. “She understands.”
The captain looked me over one last time, then frowned. “See her to her door.”
“I intend to.”
