The Red Plague Affair: Bannon & Clare: Book Two Read online

  “The Pathogenic Theory is not mine. It is Pasteur’s. And someday it will be shown to—”

  Interrupt him before he gains his head. “My dear sir, I am convinced. It is the only possible theory to explain what I have observed, and I believe you will be of inestimable help in not only this matter, but also proving beyond a shadow of a doubt some of your refinements. There are lives to be saved, Tarshie.”

  “Very well.” Tarshingale conceded, stiffly. The tip of his nose had reddened, as had his scrape-shaven cheeks. The gap between his front teeth had no doubt been wonderful for whistling, had the young Edmund ever unbent enough to do so. “I can spare ten minutes, Clare. Please, do sit, sirs. And please do not call me Tarshie.”

  It does you good, sir. Clare could imagine Miss Bannon’s arched eyebrows and amused smile, but it was not a proper thing for a gentleman to say. “My apologies.” He stepped further into the room as Edmund rose, indicating the two spindly chairs set on the other side of his desk. “Let me list for you the symptoms…”

  Chapter Twenty

  An Unseemly Display

  The Queen was still Receiving, despite the lateness of the hour. She sat, enthroned, the Stone of Scorn glowing slightly under the northern leg of the jewel-crusted chair, the ruling spirit’s attention weighting the shadows in the corners of the Throne Hall. The great glass roof had been repaired, and the stone floor, polished by a few hundred years’ worth of hungry feet seeking influence in the sovereign’s atmosphere in one way or another, was worn smooth. The roof was a great blind eye, watching everything below with impersonal exactness.

  Emma could have perhaps chosen not to hit the Reck Doors at the end of the Hall quite so hard with ætheric force, their charm-greased hinges whisper-silent as they swung inwards, the stuffed-leather pads set to stop their motion popping a trifle too loudly to be mannerly.

  She further could have chosen not to drag the errant Dr Morris the length of the Throne Hall, his heels scraping the stone and her passage accompanied by crackling sparks of stray sorcery, the simple Work used to ease his deadweight along fraying at the edges as her temper did. Mikal stalked behind her, wisely keeping his mouth shut, pale and haggard from the effort of controlling two gryphons to the Channel and back. Still, his irises flamed with yellow light, and his appearance was sufficiently disconcerting to have overridden all question or challenge so far.

  Her own appearance was likely not decorous enough to inspire confidence. Windblown, salt-crust tears slicking her chapped cheeks, and with every piece of jewellery flaming with leprous green glow, she was the very picture of an angry sorceress.

  Which probably explained the cowering among the Court, and the screams.

  Her fingers, cramping and cold, slick with seawater, rain, and sweat, vined into Morris’s hair and the cloth of his coat equally. Melting ice ran in crystal droplets from her hair, from his skin. Mikal was dry, and his dark hair disarranged; his head came up as some feral current not emanating from his Prima passed close by.

  Britannia’s attention strengthened. “Leave Us,” she whispered, Victrix’s lips shaping the hollow coldness of the words, and there was a general move to obey. Emma strode up the centre of the Hall as the Court emptied. Only the Consort remained, his dark eyes round as a child’s, his fine whiskers looking pasted on, as if he were a-mumming.

  A brush against her consciousness was another sorcerer, a Prime, no doubt, but she was past caring who witnessed this. Her arm came forward, and Morris’s form tumbled like a rag doll’s, fetching up against the steps at the Throne’s feet with a sickening looseness.

  “He killed my Shield,” she informed Britannia, and her voice, while not the power-laden darkness of the ruling spirit’s, was still enough to cause every shadow to deepen and shiver. “Justice, Britannia. After You have no use for him, he is mine.”

  Victrix’s ring-laden hand, curved protectively over her belly, tensed, but the ruling spirit rose behind her features, settling fully into its vessel. “And you, Prima, are disposed to order Us about?” Sharply, each sibilant edge a knife, just as the gryphons spoke.

  Did Victrix ever guess how like her chariot-beasts she sounded, when the spirit of the Isle filled her to the brim?

  No more than I know what I sound like, when my Discipline speaks. Emma shook the thought away. “It is no order, my Queen. It is a simple statement of fact.” And you would be wise to understand as much. Something in her recoiled from the thought… but not quickly.

  And not far. The sense of another sorcerer, very close and watching, was undeniable but the room appeared empty. Perhaps in the gallery overhead. It mattered little. For right now, Emma Bannon cared only for the woman on the throne and the gasping man on the steps between them.

  “Arrogant witchling.” But Britannia’s smile stretched wide and white, a predatory V. “We are amused. This is Morris, then.”

  “In the flesh.” But Emma did not lower her gaze and she did not pay a courtesy. Do you understand what you commissioned from him?

  Did you not think to warn me of the poison, this illness?

  Of course not. It was ridiculous. Warn a tool of its breaking, or a sword of its meeting another blade? Who would do so?

  And yet even a tool could turn in its master’s hand, when used improperly.

  I have been so used. But I was willing, was I not? And who am I to question Her?

  “We see.” Victrix’s free hand, resting on the throne’s arm, tapped its fingers precisely once, each ring spitting a spark of painful brilliance. Emma’s jewellery did not answer – but only because she willed it not to.

  I do not challenge Britannia. I serve.

  And Eli had paid the price, just as her other Shields had. The warmth of the stone inside Emma’s chest, her surety against death, turned traitorous. It was a claw against her vitals, and each of its nails was tipped with a bright hot point of loathing.

  Morris coughed, weakly. Both the Queen and the sorceress ignored him. His hollow cheeks were reddened, deadly flowers blooming under the skin. Emma held her sovereign’s gaze, Victrix’s eyes fields of darkness from lid to lid, strange dry stars glittering in their depths. They formed no constellation a man could name, those stars, and perhaps there was a Great Text that held their secrets… but it was not one Emma had ever been privileged to read.

  “And this unseemly display, sorceress?” Victrix’s tone now held no pity – or, despite her earlier words, amusement.

  A hot flush went through Emma, followed by an icy chill. So you did intend to use him in secret after this. Dear God. “You wished him returned to you. Here he is.” And that is all I will say before witnesses.

  Morris choked. Blood bubbled in his thin lips, and for the first time he spoke. Or perhaps it was only now that the terrible windrush of fury was no longer filling her ears that she could hear his mumbles.

  “Nomine Patris.” Bright blood sprayed, and the smell of sick-sweet caramel rose, adding its tang to the sweat, salt and stench of fear. “Patris… et Filii… Spiritus Sancti…”

  He’s a Papist. Inquisition filth. Revulsion filled Emma’s throat. She turned her head aside and spat, uncaring of the breach of protocol, and Alberich the Queen’s Consort inhaled sharply as he hurried down the steps, as if to render aid to the genius.

  He was perhaps a decent man, the foreign princeling. But it did no good. Morris shuddered, his heels drumming the floor as his body convulsed, broken on a hoop of its own muscle-bound making, and a fine mist of blood and fouler matter sprayed.

  Emma Bannon watched him die. When the last rattle and sob of breath had fled the corpse, she returned her gaze to her sovereign’s face…

  … and found Victrix unmoved. Perhaps she had known the manner of research Morris was engaged upon, and at least some of its dangers. Did she guess Morris had died of the same poisonous filth he had been called upon to produce for the purpose of serving Britannia’s enemies with terrible, torturous death? Or did she think Emma had somehow crushed him with a toxic sorc
ery and brought him here to die?

  The uncertain young Victrix, new to the rigours of rule and desperate for any bulwark against those who would make her a puppet, was no more.

  Now she was truly a Queen.

  Britannia was stone-still upon her Throne, and when Emma turned on her heel and stalked away, her footsteps loud in the echoing silence, her fists clenched in her black-mourning skirts, that Queen – Emma Bannon’s chosen ruler – uttered no word.

  Perhaps she understood her servant’s fury. And whoever was witnessing this scene, what tale would they carry, and to whom?

  The Consort, however, said enough for all three. “Sorceress!” he hissed. “You shall not dare approach again! You are finished! Finished!”

  Emma halted only once. She stared at Mikal’s drawn face, and his hand twitched. She shook her head, slightly, and her Shield subsided. She did not turn, but her own voice rang hard and clear as an æthrin-scry crystal.

  “No, Your Majesty the Consort. When another death is required, or another black deed is to be performed, I am Her Majesty Alexandrina Victrix’s servant. As always.” She set her jaw, for what threatened to come hard on the heels of those three sentences was couched in terms she could not make less stark.

  And the next time you insult me, petty little princeling, I shall call you to account for it as if I were a man, and this the age of duels.

  She strode from the Throne Room, her face set and white, and her Shield followed.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  A Curative Method

  Tarshingale was very still, his eyes half-lidded, his long legs tucked out of sight underneath the desk. There was a commotion in the hall outside – some manner of screaming and cursing, very usual for King’s this time of evening. Perhaps a patient requiring bleeding, or some other dreadful necessity. The surgical wells would be full of howling, with those patients fortunate enough to swoon under the assault of medical treatment the only exception.

  Finally, Tarshie stirred. “The implications,” he murmured. “The implications.”

  For Science? Or for suffering? Clare decided on an answer that was equally applicable to both. “Troubling, yes. And deep.”

  Vance had subsided into his own chair, watching Clare as he laid forth the bare facts of the case, then judicious applications of his own observations. He occasionally stroked his fair moustache with one fingertip, and Clare caught sight of an irregular inkstain on the criminal mentath’s thumb. The mix of dust and paper, the haze of Tarshingale’s living heat warring with the cold stone exhalation of the walls, the tang of carbolic and the effluvia of surgical practice, all was as it should be. Even the ghost of Valentinelli’s cologne.

  So why did he feel so… unnerved?

  Something is amiss here.

  “A rubescent miasma.” Tarshingale nodded, as if wrapping up a long internal conversation. “A very bloody illness, this is. A red film over the ocularis orbatis. Hmm.”

  Clare’s body grew cold all over. “Tarshie, old chap—”

  “Archibald, for the love of God, address me as Edmund if you feel the need to be familiar,” Tarshingale snapped, irritably. “Pray do not address me as the other.”

  “A prickly character,” Vance interjected. “You were at school together?”

  “Two years ahead.” Tarshingale rose, pushing his chair back with a weary sigh. The laboured rasp of his breathing evened out. “And he was insufferable even then.”

  “Pot calling kettle, I’m sure.” Vance’s tone bordered on the edge of insouciant. “You are not surprised at Mr Clare’s tidings, sir. And I detect a breath of sweetness in the still air of this charming hutch, which is quite out of place.”

  “Quite so.” Tarshingale did not take offence. “I am afraid I must tell you something very disturbing, Archibald. As your friend has no doubt deduced, this contagion has already arrived at King’s.” He took a deep breath, pushing his shoulders back, and his surgical coat rippled, dried blood flaking from the rough fabric. “We had four sufferers this afternoon. Three died within hours, and the fourth… well.”

  “Dear God.” Clare’s lips were numb. “You are the foremost advocate of the Pathogenic Theory, Edmund. Do tell me you have some idea of how to combat this bad bit of business.”

  “No way that does not involve quite a long bit of trial and error.” Tarshingale seemed to age in the space of a few moments, deep lines graving his face, and Clare noted with no little trepidation that a faint blush had arrived on the doctor’s scrape-shaven cheeks. “Come. He is a drover, our fourth patient, and quite hardy. If he is still alive, we may well have a chance.”

  “Damn it all,” Clare breathed.

  The ward was full of moaning, shrieking sufferers. It was almost as deadly-chaotic as Bedlam, and Clare’s infrequent visits to that hell of noise and stench were always more than enough to convince him he never wished to practise the art of Medicine.

  The patient – a heavyset, balding Spitalfields drover, carried across Londinium by two of his worried fellows who had left him and a fistful of pence in Tarshingale’s care because of Edmund’s reputation as a Charity Worker – lay in a sodden lump of blood and other matter, including the foul-sweet pus from burst boils. His empty gaze, filmed with already-clotting red, was fixed on the distant shadowy ceiling, and the indentured orderly responsible for heaving the corpse onto a barrow blinked blearily at the arrival of August Personages, well dressed and obviously healthy, in this pit.

  “Joseph Camling.” Edmund reached the bedside, and his work-roughened hand covered the staring, bloody orbs. He held the eyelids, waiting until the dead gaze could be for ever veiled. “Do you recall your History, Archibald?”

  “I recall rather everything. I am a mentath.” Clare glanced at Valentinelli, whose attention was fixed on Vance, for all he seemed to be taking no notice of the criminal mentath, whose long fastidious nose was wrinkled most unbecomingly. “Edmund—”

  “Some two hundred years ago. You would have had Tattersall for those lectures, I believe.” Edmund took his hand away, gazing upon the drover’s dead face with a peculiar expression. “My organ of Memory is rather large; though I despise phrenologomancy with a passion as unscientific it is rather useful to be measured at least once. I digress, though. I recall—”

  “Tattersall. Lecture one hundred and fifty-three.” The blood was draining from Clare’s face, he could feel it. There was a disturbing tickle in his throat, as well. A cough caught, or perhaps merely his digestion – excellent as any mentath’s, really – was beginning to turn against him. There was, he reflected, very little that could unseat a logician’s stomach. But this threatened to. “The plague. But there is no—”

  “Nine of the twelve symptoms overlap. It is foolish to discount some things simply because you cannot compass their existence.” Tarshingale drew himself up. It was his usual, pedantic, insufferable moment of lecturing. “It came to my attention that this was remarkably similar. I spent the afternoon pillaging an excellent library or two, combing for accounts of the Dark Plague and its effects.”

  A warehouse hard by the Black Wark. A perfect place for research, but… Clare’s faculties raced, and he almost staggered. Vance’s hand closed about his elbow, and the art professor steadied him most handily.

  “I say, old chap, what is it?” Did Clare’s nemesis actually look… yes, he did. It seemed impossible to credit.

  Francis Vance looked concerned.

  “Ludovico.” Clare shook free of his fellow mentath’s grasp. Tarshingale’s mouth was a thin line of disapproval, since he had been interrupted before he could gain his stride. “Hurry, man. Fetch Harthell and the carriage. We haven’t a moment to lose.”

  The Neapolitan, to give him credit, did not hesitate, merely vanished into the throng of indentured orderlies.

  Edmund’s nostrils flared. “Really, Archibald—”

  It was Francis Vance who stepped in now. “Very well. I believe now is the moment for a rather bruising carriage ride. Shall the
good physicker be coming along, old chap?”

  “Bermondsey.” Clare found himself actually wringing his hands, and almost shouting to be heard over the sudden jarring noise of the ward, intruding on his consciousness. “A plague pit. Of course. We may find the original source of the contamination, and a method or means of stopping it.”

  Vance stepped forward, as if to shake hands with Tarshingale. Whose pride had been touched now, and roundly, too.

  “I am no physicker, sir, I am a doctor of Medicine, and I shall thank you to—”

  “Very good.” Vance’s grip was bruising on Edmund’s arm, and the doctor of Medicine gasped aloud as the mentath’s fingers found a nerve-bundle and pressed home, unerringly. “Dear Archibald requires your services, sir, and we shall do our best to send you home in your original condition when he has no further use of you.”

  “Do be careful!” I sound like an old maiden auntie. How Miss Bannon would laugh. His collar was uncomfortably close, but Clare did not stop to loosen it. “Come. A Curative Method, Edmund? Tell me every particular while we hurry for the carriage. It may not be necessary for you to leave King’s.” He paused, and a rather horrible, unavoidable deduction surfaced. “I rather think,” he continued soberly, settling his hat upon his balding head, “that you shall be needed here very badly, and sooner than you think.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Unlucky Enough to Live

  It was a long way, and she was in no fit condition to be seen in public. Still, Emma kept her head down, cracked cobbles ringing under her boots, and Mikal’s presence ensured she was not troubled by catcall or jostle even in the crowd. Yellow fog crept between the buildings, threaded between carriage-wheel spokes, touched hat and hair and hand with cold, sinister damp. It was a slog-souper tonight, the fog lit from within by its own faint venomous glow, and even the air-clearing charm every Londinium sorcerer learned early and used daily could not keep its salt-nasty reek from filling the nose.