were some drunken creatures who ran that way …’
Jasper came to her aid. He explained that they had been to the theatre and had been set upon as they made their way to meet friends at the stage door. He didn’t think the attackers were thieves, but they had been threatening enough. ‘There are ladies here,’ he added.
‘What is this?’ the bobby demanded, pointing his stick at the pale man’s locked trunk.
‘Theatrical properties,’ he answered in a Swiss-German accent. The policeman frowned.
‘Open up.’
Eliza gave her handkerchief to the dwarf. Sitting up he spat some blood and reached a clean-enough finger into his mouth to explore the damage. The flesh over his jaw was darkly swelling.
‘Rest for a moment, then we’ll take you to find water and a dressing. You will be quite all right,’ she reassured him.
The bobby was staring at the trunk’s contents. A woman’s body, folded in half, was nested into a cocoon of padded velvet. Disbelieving, he ran his hands over the rubber limbs and shone his lamp into the cold glass eyes.
‘I am an engineer of automata,’ Heinrich Bayer said.
The policeman straightened up.
‘Are you, indeed? It takes all sorts. Go home now, the lot of you. I’ll see if I can catch up with your friends.’
Carlo muttered a thick phrase and Eliza patted his arm in gentle restraint.
As soon as the bobby had moved off a small knot of performers emerged from the stage door with Faith in their midst. Jasper groaned.
‘Faith, are you all right? And you, Eliza? How in the world am I going to explain to Matty that I brought you to an innocuous evening at the variety and we ended up in a pretty bout of fisticuffs?’
‘You could avoid any mention of it. That would be the easiest course,’ Eliza advised.
In the presence of the policeman the evil philosopher had made himself next to invisible. Now he seemed to regain his full stature, even to be somehow bigger and made of more solid matter than the rest of them. He became the inevitable pivot of their strange group.
‘Jasper, you have lost none of your abilities. Won’t you introduce me to your friends?’
Jasper muttered, ‘Mr Hector, ah, Mr Devil Wix. Mrs Shaw, Miss Eliza Dunlop.’
Devil bowed to Faith, but Eliza was still crouching on the cobbles with one arm supporting Carlo. The dwarf was sitting up, dabbing at his smashed mouth with her handkerchief. Devil folded himself to their level just as Jacko Grady’s barrel body and surprisingly diminutive shoes emerged from the stage door.
‘What’s this?’ the manager demanded.
‘Mr Boldoni was attacked by some pleasant individuals from your choice audience.’
‘Don’t let him lie here in front of my theatre. Is he hurt? Wix, you’d better make sure he’s fit to perform tomorrow.’
Grady secured the big padlock with much jangling of a large bunch of keys. The performance was calculated to display ownership and Devil hated him for it. Grady picked his way past them and headed towards the Strand. Turning his head, Devil saw Eliza Dunlop stick out her tongue at the man’s receding back.
‘Of course he’s hurt,’ she retorted. To Devil she said, ‘We need warm salt water to rinse out his mouth. And some light to inspect the damage.’
Carlo moaned as the pain in his jaw intensified.
‘Shhh,’ she told him, and stroked his hair.
Devil noticed that her gloves were blotched with blood and Carlo’s spittle. This detail touched him more directly than the prettiest smile or the most fashionable dress ever could have done.
Who is this? he asked himself and his eyes slid at once to Jasper’s neat boots, standing only a yard away beside Mrs Shaw.
Ah, is that it? Fair enough, he thought.
To one side of their little group Heinrich Bayer looked as if he had been violated. His face was colourless and he was trembling, his hands still on the clasps of Lucie’s box.
Devil put his hands under the dwarf’s arms. He scrambled to his feet, staggering a little under Carlo’s unexpected weight, but he found that he was able to carry him.
‘Follow me. It’s only two hundred yards,’ he called over his shoulder to the others.
The private room was on the first floor of a public house well known to Devil. The landlord admitted them and put some coals on the fire. Eliza Dunlop took off her cloak and bonnet (she had thick, glossy dark hair) and once Devil had deposited Carlo on a high stool the two women inspected his mouth. Devil gave orders and a tray clinking with glasses and a bottle soon arrived, followed by the pot boy carrying a basin and ewer and a kettle of hot water. Devil mixed a hot toddy and put it into Bayer’s hands.
‘Drink that up, man. You look as green as a lettuce. Don’t faint on me, please. Jas, you will refuse the offer of strong drink, but here is one for me. You shall have a tot, Carlo, when your medical review is completed. Good health, gentlemen. We may or may not have something to celebrate tonight. Unfortunately most of the power to determine such matters lies with Jacko Grady.’
Eliza looked over her shoulder. ‘The fat man?’
‘The same. He is the owner and manager of the Palmyra theatre. For the present,’ Devil added and tipped back his toddy.
‘He is an extremely unpleasant person,’ she said.
Devil glanced again at her discarded gloves, the emblems of the evening’s events. Carlo swilled out his mouth with hot salt water and spat a brownish stream into the bowl Faith Shaw held out for him. Eliza patted his shoulder and gave him a strip of her sister’s clean handkerchief, snipped with a pair of nail scissors taken from her reticule, to put inside his mouth.
‘Well done. You will heal up in a few days. I don’t believe your jaw is broken.’
Carlo couldn’t smile, or even speak clearly with his mouth stuffed with linen but his appreciation was plain.
‘Are you thuh they ith no boken bone?’
Eliza ran her fingers over his jaw then cupped his large chin in her hands. Carlo gazed up at her with as much admiring awe as if she had stepped out of a vision of heaven.
‘I’m not a nurse, but I know a little anatomy. It’s badly bruised where that ruffian’s toe connected, and there are tooth cuts to your tongue and the insides of your cheeks. You should gargle with salt water to keep your mouth clean, but I am confident that there is nothing more serious.’
‘We muth go on tomohoh. Thuh will be nowt to pleathe an audience if I am not thuh.’
Carlo waved his empty hand to Devil who passed him his tot in eloquent silence. The dwarf removed his dressing, drank, and winced extravagantly as the alcohol stung his open cuts. Mrs Shaw and her sister had declined Devil’s
