Chapter 12
It was easy enough to disappear in London.
Too easy. Celia knew all too well how you could lose yourself in the city’s cogs and gears—become just another banker with a bowler jostling off the Underground station, not even set apart by the carnation you bought from the women selling flowers on the curb of Piccadilly Circus.
Crowds swirled here like the last trickles of water down an unstopped drain, catching double-decker buses that were always coming and going.
Coming and going. Carrying the same versions of different people who read their adverts for Cadbury Cocoa and then thought to themselves that chocolate might be nice, after a long day of turning around in circles.
Doing the same thing again and again and again.
A few of the bolder passengers might dream of going to the Kit-Cat Club, where they could rub shoulders with film stars and gangsters, drinking champagne and enjoying a cabaret and trying to forget that more work waited for them in the morning.
It was a predictable pattern—gray and gold and work and want—as predictable as the dresses young ladies came to order in the shop where Celia worked. They all wanted the same thing.
She wanted to get the hell out of there.
It finally seemed to be happening, though it wasn’t exactly going the way she’d envisioned.
For example, Celia hadn’t thought of catching a bus with a bullet-heir and his battered fiancée.
Biz had managed to mop most of the blood off her face, but the driver still gave the group odd looks as they disembarked at Limehouse.
They were too well-dressed for the neighborhood.
It was a gritty place, cut through with narrow streets.
Everything seemed weary—even the brick tenements leaned like a man who’d had one too many drinks.
Their inhabitants trudged on, pulling carts of goods bound for the nearby docks.
Children darted around these, dirty bare feet slapping against the cobblestones.
This pitter-patter was punctured by the clang of a blacksmith’s hammer, somewhere down the way.
“Are we supposed to find a ship here?” Vincent cast a despairing glance at the road, which was becoming muddier.
“I’m not sure what sort of people you know, Miss Sinclair, but I refuse to be stuffed in a hold like a crate of radishes.
If we must flee the country, we should do it in style.
I’m thinking first-class tickets bought under pseudonyms. No one asks too many questions if you’re rich enough—”
“No one is sailing anywhere.” Celia kept marching down the lane, toward a house that leered over the river when the tide was high.
The Thames was low again; she could see more mudlarks picking through the mud between shored boats.
Brown water lapped behind them, not a tendril of fog in sight…
On the nearby porch sat the Mudlarks’ Mum, examining the gritty objects her flock of orphans brought to her.
She also gave Celia’s entourage a thorough examination as they clambered up the steps.
“Miss Sinclair. You’ve kept yourself busy, I see.” The woman’s gleaming eyes landed on her locket. Celia had closed the piece, but she hadn’t thought to hide it back under her gown. She rectified this quickly.
She couldn’t stuff Ezra down her dress, unfortunately. The Mum’s gaze darted to the scholar—assessing his bandaged hand and disheveled hair as if he was some mud-covered Roman coin. If he was, Celia thought grimly, she’d probably chuck him back into the river.
“I thought I told you to steer clear, love,” the older woman sighed. “Now here you are, dragging trouble to my door.”
“We won’t stay long. I need quick passage to Egypt.”
“Egypt?” The Mum’s tone told Celia that she clearly remembered the conversation they’d had about Ezra’s mother.
“You told me there are doors that the Order doesn’t know about—”
“Aye.” A gust of wind tossed the gray wisps escaping the Mum’s bun. They matched the fringe of the shawl she was wearing. “But such passage won’t come cheap for the four of you.”
“I’m the only one who will be going.”
Celia hardly had time to process Ezra’s declaration before Vincent let out another humorless laugh. At the same time, Biz hissed something that sounded like bollocks.
“If you think you’re going to leave us here in the devil’s swampy crotch while you go gallivanting through the Sahara, you are sorely mistaken!
” The bullet-heir climbed up another one of the steps he and his fiancée had been hovering on.
The movement would have drawn him closer to Ezra, if the scholar hadn’t matched it.
“I’m not safe,” he said with a leaden voice. “You saw what my magic did to Everett. If I lose control again and one of you happens to be standing too close—”
Celia cut him off. “I told you that I don’t care.” She could feel the Mum’s gaze, proving her wrong. “Exactly how far do you think you’ll get without my help? You read hieroglyphs, yes, but you don’t know the Order like I do. You need me, Ezra Bright.”
She stepped close to him, nearly as close as they’d been in the sarcophagus. Celia had spent a long time in that coffin trying to make out the lines of Ezra’s face—but every time she thought she got a good picture of him, he kept slipping back into darkness.
Now, however, she could see just how torn he was.
“She’s right, Bright,” Vincent jutted in. “You’ve got to stop pushing people away. I know it’s your modus operandi, but by God, would it kill you to accept a little help? Some camaraderie?”
Biz lurched up the steps until she was on even footing with her half brother.
Their similarities were as striking as their differences: lily-pond eyes, the same purse of the mouth.
On Elizabeth Ellington, these things looked shrewd.
On Ezra, they were uncertain. The flapper’s blond hair frayed against the wind as she stared up at the scholar.
“Don’t you dare leave me behind again,” she said ferociously.
Ezra swallowed. Celia realized, with a start, that he was actually wavering. He glanced back at Vincent and swallowed again.
“I’ll take you to Egypt if you give me that key of yours.” The Mudlarks’ Mum pointed to the second chain—the one Celia had worn so long that it had left permanent indents in the back of her neck.
She couldn’t take it off now.
She shook her head.
“That locket, then.”
Again, Celia hesitated. The key, the locket, the boa, the knife… They were all she had left of her father. What would it mean if she just handed these things away like halfpence?
“Here!” Biz lurched forward again, twisting the engagement ring from her finger and setting it on the table amid muddy medicine bottles and pipe stems. “Take this! For all four of us,” she added.
The diamond was large, yes, and encrusted with extra emeralds, but Celia was surprised when the Mudlarks’ Mum held it up to the sun.
She couldn’t seriously be considering the jewels…
could she? The woman spit on the gemstones, tapped them with her filthy nail, and held them up to her ear.
She sniffed them, then spit at the central diamond once more.
Vincent, for his part, looked horrified.
Celia couldn’t imagine how much money he’d spent on the piece.
But money wasn’t what the Mudlarks’ Mum wanted…
There must have been something else about the jewel the woman liked, because she polished it with her shawl and slipped the ring onto her own mud-encrusted finger.
“You have yourselves a deal.”
All roads lead to Rome.
Even the magical ones.
Mum’s mudlarks had dug around in London’s dirt long enough to know that the city didn’t stop at the white-tiled platforms of the Underground.
It went on—through manholes, down ladders, into even deeper tunnels, across subterranean rivers of sewage flowing beneath brick arches.
Then there were even older waterways: wells dug by Roman foot soldiers.
Celia had sat through many lessons on that empire—and she’d always assumed that the foot soldiers in question had actually marched their way across Europe in order to conquer it.
The plebeians, certainly. But the patricians? The gods? They’d made their own paths.
The door itself was unimpressive. Hardly even a door at all—the stone archway looked like several of the other crumbling structures they’d passed as they followed a scrawny girl with pigtails into the bowels of London.
The child scuttled through the portal, which Celia only discovered was a portal after seeing that the tunnel walls were carved out of volcanic stone.
There were no volcanoes in London, so far as she knew.
They’d emerged in a place where the past wasn’t so deeply buried.
“Is that the Colosseum?” Biz gasped as they trailed the mudlark through ruins filled with statues of Roman gods and emperors.
“Looks that way…” Celia eyed the sculptures warily.
Many were headless, so they weren’t watching back, but she kept waiting for one of them to spring to life and chase her.
As it was, the group moved unnoticed. Why weren’t they being chased?
She’d expected more of a fuss, considering the way they’d left things at the Cotswolds’ cottage.
The mudlark slipped through some hedges that had grown over a set of stairs.
These led down into the earth. The dirt was much drier here—almost dustlike.
As Celia followed the girl down the corridor, she realized that this began to change.
Soon it was sand making its way into her mud-caked slippers.
Air baked inside her lungs. There was a glow in the tunnel ahead, too bright to belong to Rome’s sun.
Another breath and she could smell the sea, mixed with golden scents of cumin and coriander.
“Up here’s the city of Alexandria,” their guide explained over her shoulder.
“We need to get to Cairo.” Celia could still picture the four triangles, lined up like gowns in a shop window. She doubted the pyramids would look quite so neat in Giza.
The girl shrugged. “The Romans never reached that far. You’ll have to catch a train…”
“Now wait just a minute,” Vincent called out from the tunnel’s rear. “We paid you well. More than well. And you aren’t even going to take us where we need to go?”
The mudlark shrugged again. “You said Egypt. This is Egypt.”
“It’s all right, Vince,” Ezra said softly.
“It’s highway robbery is what it is. Do you know how much that ring was worth? Door-to-door service. At the very least!”
The look Biz shot her fiancé was sharp. “There should be plenty of other rings where we’re going, darling.”