A Cat In Gloves Catches No Mice.
(MRS PRITTY’S PROVERBS: FOR THEM AS NEEDS IT)
St Giles, London.
Aghost.
Alasdair was chasing a damn ghost.
Oh, not the sort that silently glided through castle walls, hands stained with blood and eyes black with sorrow. Or the noisy spectres that slammed doors, rattled shutters and moaned at midnight.
No, this one strode up Drury Lane in a tattered dark-green cloak and brown skirts, cheeks flush with the dusk cold and lips chapped by the winter wind.
She had a companion aside her again, a dark-haired lass with threadbare gloves. They’d linked arms for warmth, breaths rising in white wisps as they chatted. Even laughed. All whilst his own earthly world had been torn asunder.
But then ghosts did tend to have that effect.
Alasdair’s particular ghost had altered since her demise six years past.
Even from his vantage point behind the turnip cart, he could discern shadows beneath her eyes, marring a skin so pale that even a porcelain cup would be envious.
She was thinner too. This was not so obvious as she was swaddled in ten layers of cheap wool but could still be discerned from the sharpness of her cheekbones and the delicacy of her chin.
The spectral realm, it seemed, was a parsimonious host.
Her hair colour he could not observe due to the ugly black bonnet, though most of London still wore mourning attire after the untimely death of Princess Charlotte last month. Even so, Alasdair’s ghost was still beautiful. As graceful as her name, step dainty as she avoided the horse dung.
Dair breathed deep. And then regretted it as the smell of rot was all-pervading in this district, even on a frosty fifth day before Christmas.
The ghost and her companion turned left into Brownlow Street – an apt name for a drab and ignoble place on the edge of St Giles Rookery. A row of residential lodgings crouched around a building dedicated to impoverished females about to give birth – The Lying-in Hospital for Married Women.
He narrowed his eyes and abandoned the turnip cart, boots rapid along Drury Lane before he also turned left.
Two days ago, some jug-bitten coxcomb had accosted his ghost in this street, laid hands upon her, and Alasdair had nigh rushed to her aid, but she had clearly acquired a few skills in the spectral realm as she’d stamped on the coxcomb’s foot and shoved him to the ground.
Alasdair had stepped back into the shadows.
The ghost and her companion walked on past the hospital, whose classical but now grimy facade still outshone the rest of the buildings, past the same old man in rags and the child playing in the gutter, before they paused outside a narrow brick house with small dingy windows.
A door key, he knew, would be produced before his ghost would enter and vanish.
As a rule, Alasdair’s courage would then depart. As would he.
Drink liquor until he could forget what he’d witnessed. Or visit a gambling hell and let the cards commandeer his soul.
But not this eve.
This eve, he would meet his past…