The Society of Blood Read online

  Clover had laughed when I’d told her this, but it had annoyed her too. ‘If he thinks it’s vulgar just for a woman to express an opinion,’ she said, ‘maybe we ought to take him back with us when we find the heart. It would blow his tiny mind.’

  Clover had been here when I’d arrived, installed apparently by an older version of me, who had been in possession of the heart I was currently searching for. He had explained just enough of the situation to prepare her for my arrival, and this had helped to cement my trust in her. Before her appearance, despite all we’d been through together, I’d harboured a lingering thread of doubt – in fact, if I was honest with myself, I still did, but it was now gossamer thin, and appeared only when I was overly stressed or tired, which in turn tended to bring out the paranoia in me. I reasoned that if a future version of me had brought her here to help, then she must be trustworthy – at least according to my older self. It followed, therefore, that if Clover did have a hidden agenda, she must be playing a long game – a very long game, in fact.

  This, of course, was assuming that Clover’s claim to have been transported here by an older me was true. However, as Hawkins had confirmed her story, I was inclined to believe it. Now and again it did occur to me to wonder whether both of them might be in league with my enemies, and were protecting me only to preserve me for an even bigger fall somewhere down the line. But that was a ridiculous and destructive way to think, wasn’t it? I mean, what, for them, would be the point?

  And believing Clover’s story gave me a reason to be optimistic about my own personal future, and that was something I was loath to relinquish. The idea that an older me had brought her here, together with evidence that future versions of me had used the heart to perform other deeds – not least buy this house and set up an entire portfolio of business interests – enabled me to cling to the hope that, whatever happened, eventually everything would turn out okay.

  Was it really that simple, though? Was my fate already mapped out? I’d seen dozens of movies where the hero or villain went back in time and changed history, thus altering the future they’d come from. But in truth I had no idea how time really worked, how flexible it was. Whenever I tried to think it through, it tied my head in knots. It always came back to variations on that age-old conundrum: what if you travelled back in time and killed your grandfather – would you cease to exist? The impossibility of that suggested that time travel was a nonsense, that it couldn’t be feasible. Yet it was feasible; I was proof of it. But maybe time had its own rules that couldn’t be broken? Maybe the person who tried to kill their grandfather would find themselves constantly thwarted for one reason or another?

  The fact that I didn’t know, couldn’t know, meant that I couldn’t afford to be blasé about my future. I couldn’t assume that just because I had ‘evidence’ that my future self was in possession of the heart it automatically meant I was destined to find it.

  Once Hope had opened her other presents – a doll; a stuffed horse; a drawing set comprising paper, pencils and an India rubber; a toy theatre with cardboard figures on sticks; a music box; a magic lantern with slides of animals and famous buildings – she sat in a kind of stupor, her eyes dazzled and dreamy. For a girl who’d had nothing her whole life, who had no concept of the notion of ‘Christmas’, and didn’t even know how old she was, this was probably too much. Yet Clover and I had wanted to treat her, had wanted to try to roll all the Christmases she’d missed into one glorious celebration. Of course, material things didn’t bring happiness, they didn’t heal a scarred soul, but we were doing our best to deal with that too. We were providing Hope with love and kindness and security, and hoping it would be enough.

  Clover, still kneeling beside Hope, said brightly, ‘Right, what shall we play with first?’ She reached for the magic lantern, her eyes shining, as though showing Hope how to play the role of Eager Child on Christmas Morning. ‘How about this?’

  With something to focus on, Hope blinked and nodded, a smile creeping across her face. Watching her I was hit with a sudden, unexpected wave of sadness. Although I wasn’t missing out on Christmas morning with Kate – that was a different time, a different world, away – it felt as though I was. I couldn’t shake the notion that Christmas was a time for family, and that Kate should be here with me, with us, opening presents and joining in the celebrations. For a moment I saw her, sitting on the carpet with Hope, squinting adorably behind her pink-framed spectacles. I remembered last Christmas morning – or at least, my last Christmas morning: Kate’s excitement; her squeals of delight as she opened her presents. I’d made us both pancakes for breakfast, and then we’d sat on the settee in our pyjamas, my daughter burrowing into the gap between my arm and my hip like a warm puppy as we watched – for about the hundredth time – Toy Story on the telly.

  My eyes blurred with tears; my head went stuffy and hot. I sniffed and Clover glanced at me. Her eyes flashed a question: Are you all right?

  I stood up as unobtrusively as possible. Hope was still preoccupied with the magic lantern, gazing with awe as the first image – a springing tiger, mouth open in a snarl – appeared in faint, broken patches on furniture and the wall beyond.

  ‘I… er… just have to deal with something,’ I muttered. ‘I’ll be back soon.’

  Clover nodded her understanding as I crossed the room and slipped out of the door.

  In the corridor, I leaned against the wall, pressed my cool fingers to my closed eyelids and took a shuddering breath. I exhaled hard, opening my eyes in time to glimpse my breath as a faint curl of mist in the air. This house on the edge of Kensington Gardens, which I had suddenly found myself rich enough to own, was big and high-ceilinged, its walls adorned with paintings, mirrors and stuffed animal heads, its many rooms crammed with furniture, fabrics and artefacts from China and the Far East. Sumptuous as it was, though, like the majority of homes at this time it didn’t have central heating. Hot running water, yes – that was heated from the kitchen range. But for now we lived, as Clover had put it, ‘like cavemen’, Mrs Peake and her staff having to stoke up the fires in every room each morning to stave off the biting winter cold.

  Twitching my nose at the smell of slowly roasting turkey drifting up from the basement kitchen, I crossed the icy hall, bypassing the foot of the wide staircase, which faced the front door across an expanse of patterned floor tiles. The first door I came to on the opposite side of the hallway opened into the morning room, but I ignored that and continued along the corridor leading to the rear of the house. Wall-mounted gas lamps, whose paraffin-like fumes overwhelmed the delectable aroma of our Christmas dinner, dispelled the deepening gloom here. Gaslight might look pretty in films and TV dramas, but as well as being whiffy it gobbled up huge amounts of oxygen, which meant that unless the room you were in was well ventilated (and who wants a well ventilated room in the dead of winter?) you invariably ended up with a stinker of a headache. I’d told Hawkins and the household staff that as soon as electricity became domestically available I’d be signing up for it. Mrs Peake was dubious; she thought electricity was dangerous and unreliable, that it would never catch on. When I tried to assure her that it was the way forward she gave me pitying looks.

  Pushing open the solid oak door into the library, I was met with a billow of warmth. It enfolded me like an arm around the shoulders, drawing me towards the log fire, which danced and crackled behind the dark mesh of the fireguard. Although real fires were cosy, they left a thin layer of sooty grime on every surface – not good for the hundreds of leather-bound books lining the floor-to-ceiling shelves. This had been one of the things that had most surprised me about Victorian London – how horribly dirty it was. I’d known about the Industrial Revolution, the dark, satanic mills, the growth of mechanisation, all that. I’d even known about the rookeries, the workhouses, the terrible poverty – and yet there had still been a part of my brain that associated the Victorian era with elegance and innocence and romanticism.

  Not so. Victorian London was fil
thy. And it wasn’t just the poor areas of London that were bad, it was everywhere. Coal was used not only in industry, but to heat virtually every household in the city. This meant that every day thousands of fires belched out soot and fumes, as a result of which the stonework of most of the buildings was black, the pavements muddy underfoot, the air itself not only gritty and hazy, but often so smoky it was sometimes hard to breathe. On days when the air was particularly damp, the smog was so brown and dense you couldn’t see more than a couple of feet in any direction. Also there was shit everywhere – dog shit on the pavements, horse shit in the road. And the people smelled. Because there was no deodorant, few showers, or bathrooms even, and clothes were hand-washed and often hung out to dry in smoky environments, even those who were lucky enough (or scrupulous enough) to wash regularly had a slightly musty, sweaty, smoky odour about them. It wasn’t nice, but it was something you had to accept and get used to.

  And I had got used to it in many ways. It’s amazing how quickly you can adapt to a new environment. Which didn’t mean I wasn’t still often struck by how amazing and terrifying and disorientating this situation was. I had travelled in time. I was living in history. Queen Victoria was on the throne (and next year would become the longest-reigning monarch in British history); the Jack the Ripper murders had happened only seven years ago, which meant that the killer, whoever he was, could still be alive. Arthur Conan Doyle was on hiatus from writing his Sherlock Holmes stories, but was yet to write his most famous, The Hound of the Baskervilles. Elsewhere in the world, the likes of Monet, Lenin, H.G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, Sigmund Freud and Joseph Lister were going about their business. The Eiffel Tower was a mere six years old; last year the Lumière brothers had invented the cinematograph; somewhere in Germany X-rays had just been discovered.

  Sometimes I would literally get the shakes thinking about it all. I thought about it now as I walked slowly across to the windows that overlooked the stretch of lawn at the side of the house. I was a man who could see into the future. If I wanted I could use my foreknowledge in all sorts of ways to earn myself a fortune – or rather, a greater fortune than the one I had already earned.

  The snow outside was a foot deep, even deeper where it had banked up against the trees and bushes at the perimeter of my property. Though I couldn’t see anyone, I knew there were people watching the house; people patrolling the area around the house, on the lookout for anything suspicious. They constituted a small fraction of the vast army I employed, or at least paid, not only to guard my interests but to keep their eyes and ears open for any news of the heart. It was an army that had been recruited from all walks of life.

  Those who guarded the house did so on a rotational basis, and had instructions to be as circumspect as possible. They’d been handpicked by Hawkins – tough men who would otherwise be working on the docks or the railways, or even keeping themselves afloat by nefarious means. In view of the weather, I’d instructed Mrs Peake to keep them supplied with bread and cheese and beef tea. I’d even told Hawkins to make sure they took turns to come inside now and again to warm themselves by the kitchen range.

  How effective the guard would be if the Wolves of London decided to launch an attack I had no idea, but their presence gave me some peace of mind. I watched the snow drift lazily down from a sky so colourless it was as if God had forgotten to fill it in. The snow formed spirals, helixes; it was mesmerising. After a while I wondered if the patterns were trying to tell me something.

  I felt calmer now, less friable. White Christmas, I thought, and smiled at the idea of becoming an internationally renowned songwriter. I wondered what would happen if I were to ‘write’ songs I knew from the future – songs by Burt Bacharach, Irving Berlin, say – and claim them as my own. Would time warp and crack and shatter? Would reality unravel?

  Something popped in the fire – a rusty nail, a knot of wood. I turned away from the window and went back to spend Christmas with my ‘family’.

  * * *

  Later, after turkey and plum pudding had been eaten, after charades had been played, after Hope had collapsed into bed, exhausted but happy, after Mrs Peake and the girls – Polly, Florence and Hattie – had retired to their rooms at the top of the house, and Clover and Hawkins were in the drawing room, sharing a bottle of port and chatting in front of the fire, I went outside.

  I did this most nights. It had become a habit. I was like a crusty old colonel in some far-flung outpost, patrolling the perimeter of his domain to check on the morale of his men and ensure that all was well before sealing the lid on another day.

  I went armed. Both Hawkins and Clover insisted on it. I carried a howdah pistol, a large-calibre handgun, which had been designed for use against the lions, tigers and other dangerous animals in colonial Africa and India. Hawkins had acquired it for me – I didn’t ask from where. Again I had no idea how useful it would be against the Wolves of London – Tallarian and his mechanical army, the shape-shifter – but at least it felt reassuring, and it allowed Clover and Hawkins to convince themselves I was as well-protected as I could be.

  As it was Christmas night I went out armed not only with my trusty pistol, but with a hamper of goodies – turkey sandwiches, a quarter wheel of cheese, mince pies, Christmas cake, a bottle of good brandy – with which to feed the troops. Although it had stopped snowing it was still bitterly cold and my breath hung on the air like a Yuletide apparition. My feet made soft crumping sounds as I plodded through the snow, the shadows in the depressions I left behind shimmering blue in the moonlight. From the front door I turned left, trudging parallel to the front of the house, before turning left again into deeper shadow when I reached the first corner. As I plodded along the side of the house, taking exaggerated, clown-like steps, I scanned the black, jagged screen of trees and bushes at the edge of the property, but all was still.

  Then something shifted, black on black. I peered harder, my right hand slipping inside my fur-collared topcoat – all my coats and jackets had been fitted with a special pocket in which I could carry my pistol. Like a globule of oil breaking free from a slick, a shape detached itself from the larger clump of blackness behind it. As it moved towards me the snow creaked like polystyrene.

  ‘Name yourself,’ I challenged.

  ‘Frith, sir.’ The voice was gruff and phlegmy, with a pronounced Scottish accent. ‘Donald Frith.’

  I relaxed, though not entirely. The shape-shifter could adopt the guise of anyone so perfectly it was impossible to tell the fake from the real thing. Already I had seen it in the forms of Clover, Barnaby McCallum and DI Jensen. Who was to say it couldn’t catch me off-guard by taking on the form of one of my protectors?

  ‘Tell me today’s word, Mr Frith.’

  I heard the man clear his throat in the darkness, as if about to make an important proclamation. ‘Crackerjack.’

  I smiled. My hand slipped from beneath my coat. ‘Do you have a lantern?’

  ‘I do, sir.’

  ‘Then light it, by all means.’

  It hadn’t taken me long to adopt the Victorian speech patterns I heard around me every day, though I sometimes wondered whether the idioms and rhythms I found myself slipping into had more to do with Sherlock Holmes movies and TV period dramas than actual reality. If the natives ever thought I spoke a bit oddly they didn’t mention it. Perhaps they were too polite. Or perhaps they thought I was a foreigner and that English was my second language. I was purposely vague about my origins.

  After a few seconds of fumbling, a Lucifer flared in the darkness and next moment a brass lantern in Frith’s other hand was glowing brightly. Frith held it up, as if to emphasise that he’d complied with my suggestion, his black form acquiring a flickering orange definition, which gave the snow around him the appearance of softly glowing lava. When he grinned, his craggy, bewhiskered face crumpled up like an old leather shoe, full of pits and grooves.

  ‘There you are, sir,’ he said. ‘A very Merry Christmas to you.’

  ‘And to you, Mr F
rith. Though I’m afraid that yours can’t have been as merry as all that. I’m sorry that you drew the short straw today.’

  ‘The short straw, sir?’

  ‘What I mean is, I’m sorry that you’re out here alone on Christmas night.’

  Frith shook his grizzled, leonine head. Like the rest of the men that Hawkins had selected, he was tall and bulky, though some of his bulk could be attributed to the fact that in order to keep warm he wore numerous layers of clothing. Much of it, in common with the majority of London’s population, was baggy, colourless, patched, threadbare, ragged at the edges. The cap on his head, from which his badly cut hair jabbed like dark straw, resembled a cowpat with a brim; the scarf around his neck was not much more than a length of grey rag. The pockets of his brownish jacket sagged and gaped, as though full of stones, and his boots were wrapped with cloth and twine to prevent them from falling apart.

  ‘Not at all, sir, not at all,’ he said amiably. ‘I’ve little else to do. And gainful employment keeps me from indulging in certain devilish temptations, if you get my drift.’ He tilted a hand towards his mouth in a drinking gesture.

  I thought of the brandy in my hamper, and wondered whether it might be best to keep it there. ‘I hope I’m not depriving your family of your company, though, Mr Frith?’

  ‘All gone, sir,’ he said bluntly. ‘My wife was a good woman – too good for me. Took to her heels some years back and my bairns with her…’ He wafted a hand, as though scattering seed to the wind.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Frith raised his bushy eyebrows in surprise. ‘Nothing for you to be sorry about, sir. Nothing at all.’

  ‘Even so,’ I said. Then in order to avoid awkwardness I patted the hamper. ‘I’ve brought you some sustenance. Thought you might be hungry.’

  ‘That’s powerful kind of you, sir. And I won’t deny that some wittles would be most welcome.’