Chapter 40
Chapter forty
London
Eames was on his way back to his lodgings when he saw an unexpected policeman.
He slunk into the nearest alley. He knew of a relatively clean restaurant at the end of this alley, frequented by Asiatics, and the policeman would be unlikely to come that way.
Many of them were in the pay of the opium dealers.
He would wait at the restaurant until his appointment later that evening at the canal, where he would assess a potential recruit to the Brotherhood.
It was a step down from the Ormdale assignment, but he was desperately grateful for it regardless.
Eames found a dim corner inside it and carefully surveyed the restaurant from behind a newspaper.
To his surprise, his eyes fell on an apple-cheeked English girl.
His senses sharpened. Why was she here? Had she been lured here under some pretext? Was her food drugged?
She seemed completely off her guard, and exactly the sort of girl to be targeted due to her physical attributes and unsuspicious nature.
He almost wished he hadn’t come in. It was not his mission to protect naive females from the consequences of their actions.
But another part of him argued that this was what the Brotherhood was for—to protect that which was lovely from the forces of darkness.
And this girl was lovely.
“Not my responsibility,” he muttered to himself.
It wasn’t the first time he had said that. He’d said it to a Boer woman once. She’d held up her filthy child, all limbs and eyes it had seemed, and pleaded with him in guttural tones.
“Please, can’t you see ve are starfing here?”
He shook himself. Memories could not hurt him. She and the child were long buried.
This girl, however, was alive—very much so. So Eames waited and watched.
A little later, the sly foreign girl who was with her slipped away from the table, no doubt to alert her associates to their opportunity.
He quickly crossed the restaurant and bent over the table so only she could hear him, peering at her over his tinted glasses.
“I say,” he whispered. “I’m dreadfully concerned that you may have been drugged.”
She gazed fixedly into his eyes, and a little tremor went through her.
“Do you think I’m in danger, Mr…?” she asked.
“Eames,” he said, startled into giving his real name by her confiding expression. “I think you are in very grave danger.”
“Won’t you help me find a police station, Mr Eames?” she asked.
He looked about him nervously. The last place in the world he wanted to go was a police station. What had his chivalrous impulses got him into now?
She reached out and grabbed his sleeve.
“Do please help me,” she pleaded, laying the other hand on her bosom. “I think I feel the drug taking effect.”
Eames chewed his lip. There would be a description of him at the station. He could go and call the bobby at the corner, but they would want him to make a statement. If only he hadn’t let that awful Worms girl see his eyes!
“Please—they’re coming…” and with this ominous prediction, her head fell onto his arm.
Eames pulled her up and out of the chair.
“I’ll take you someplace safe, my dear,” he said reassuringly, although he was thinking of where might be best to dump her to avoid attracting police attention himself. Somewhere safer than this, hopefully, but his first concern was to get away.
A few of the sailors were giving him hard glances now, elbowing each other and speaking in their confounded babble.
He shuffled them both to the door. She wasn’t the deadweight he had feared, and moved her feet quite helpfully.
They were half out the door when one of the sailors clapped him on the shoulder.
“See ‘ere,” the man said in startling cockney. “What’s going on? Do you know this bloke, miss?”
“Miss Fairweather!” a woman’s voice called sharply from behind them.
This adventure was souring quickly.
“Oh, do call the policeman!” the girl whimpered at him, pawing his arm.
At this point, Eames heartily wished he had left the English girl to her fate. It was entirely her fault for risking her freedom and virtue in this reckless way.
“Police!” he shouted, and dropped her on the threshold to make a run for it.
Only to stagger and fall flat on his face, banging his nose on the pavement.
There was a thumpety-thump of boots around him as the coolies spilled out from the restaurant and formed a circle around him.
He groaned and clutched at his knee—something had made it seize up.
Was his old injury coming back to plague him?
But no—his hand found the curve of an umbrella handle.
He twisted himself round. His eyes tracked up the umbrella to the face of the rosy English girl.
She flipped the umbrella round so that its glinting point pointed at his throat.
The girl used your chivalrous instincts against you. But you’ll be all the more on your guard next time, won’t you?
But Eames hadn’t been on his guard. And now he was in a dreadful spot.
“Harold Eames!” she shouted. “This is a citizen’s arrest. You are wanted in Yorkshire for trespassing, assault, damage to a dragon, attempted theft of an ancient relic, and…being a general nuisance!”
A policeman’s whistle caught everyone’s attention. Through the sailors’ legs, Eames saw two bobbies coming at a fast clip down the alleyway.
This was his last and only chance.
Eames clutched his midsection as if he’d been kicked. “They attacked me!” he wailed.
Confusion reigned. Several of the sailors slipped away, others shouted at them in protest. A brotherly scuffle broke out between two of them.
Meanwhile, the English girl was shrieking and pointing at Eames, but there were so many people all knotted together that it wasn’t clear who had attracted her ire.
It was now or never. Eames scuttled across the alley and into the darkest, narrowest passage that presented itself to him.