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 offer of a small glass of wine, but they agreed to a cup of tea and the pot boy now reappeared with a second tray.
They disposed themselves around the fire. Faith Shaw presided over the teapot and Heinrich Bayer released Lucie from her velvet casing, bringing forward a chair so she could join them. He placed her hands in her lap, arranged her skirts and straightened her necklace. He was more comfortable now that he could see her and be assured that she was not threatened, and his face regained its more normal degree of pallor. Eliza watched all this with her bright eyes, but when he felt her attention on him Herr Bayer stared at the floor.
Even so, it was a convivial gathering. Jasper stopped saying that he must take the ladies home or else poor Matthew would be frantic with worry.
Faith remarked, ‘He will not be worried, Jasper, because he knows that we are safe with you.’
‘We can look after ourselves,’ Eliza corrected her. ‘Besides which we have the security of this lady’s blameless company, don’t we?’
‘Lucie. Her name is Lucie,’ Heinrich insisted.
Eliza left her seat and went to take the automaton’s hand. If she was disconcerted by its lifelike appearance coupled with the cold touch of the rubber skin she gave no sign of it. ‘How do you do?’ she murmured.
Heinrich was pleased. ‘She is well, thank you. A little tired this evening. Our stage performances are always exhausting for her, and I wish the audience had been more appreciative. They were a rough crowd.’
Eliza returned to her seat. ‘Is Lucie your daughter? Perhaps a closer relationship? You dance together so beautifully.’
Devil stared. Miss Dunlop was unusual for looking like a perfectly orthodox young woman and yet being startlingly un-demure. He noticed now that Jasper Button regarded her with admiration that was tinged with possessiveness. How charming, how pleasant for Jasper, he thought.
‘Lucie is my life’s work. And also my dear companion,’ Heinrich was saying. He didn’t look at Eliza as he spoke. ‘She is the amalgam of art and artifice. Few people understand what it is to have created such a thing. I designed each mechanism that animates her, I made or contrived to have made every separate piece of her.’
‘Maybe such appreciation requires an artistic temperament? Eliza is herself an artist, you know,’ Faith put in.
Devil liked the sly, humorous mischief displayed by the two sisters.
‘I am only a student of art,’ Eliza demurred. ‘I attend classes in life drawing, sculpture, painting. Of course, I don’t have the means to pay outright for my tuition so I make payments in kind by working as a life model.’
The images generated by this information caused Devil to cough into his brandy. Jasper frowned at him.
‘You do know thomething abouth anatomy,’ Carlo agreed.
‘Shall we finish the bottle?’ Devil wondered as he stirred up the fire with the iron poker. Carlo held out his glass. Jasper looked at his pocket watch and Heinrich glanced towards Lucie. The sisters seemed perfectly at ease.
Conversation turned to the evening’s entertainment, and its strengths and shortcomings.
‘Tell us about the Philosophers illusion, Mr Wix,’ Faith said. ‘We were most impressed.’
Devil bowed. ‘I regret that I can’t reveal to you how the illusion was actually performed. No professional magician will ever reveal his secrets, even amongst friends. I was helped by Jasper’s skills, as you saw. His modelled head of Carlo is a masterpiece. And Carlo himself has certain, ah, invaluable attributes.’
Carlo spat into the wadded dressings to clear his mouth. ‘You thaw a bocth trick. It’th thimple enough but thith one can’t be performed without a dwarf to do the work. The idea and the thkill in it were mine. Devil and I made up a bit of bithineth to go with it. You get a bigger effeck on a proper thtage like tonight’th, where you’ve got muthicianth and lighth and thuchlike.’
‘But … you appeared to be tall,’ Faith put in.
The dwarf shrugged. ‘Thtilth.’
‘I am relieved it doesn’t cause you pain to talk so much,’ Devil said to him.
‘Devil?’ Eliza softly wondered. ‘Didn’t I hear Jasper call you Hector first of all?’
‘Devil Wix is my stage name. It is … simpler to go by that in both spheres of my existence.’
‘And you and Jasper have known each other since you were boys, I believe?’
The firelight glowed on pewter dishes and the smoke-yellowed walls. From the street beneath the window came the rumble of carriage wheels.
Devil gave a brief nod. The two sisters exchanged a glance and Jasper produced his pocket watch for the last time.
‘If we are to have any hope of seeing you safely back home before midnight …’
‘It has been a fascinating evening. Thank you,’