Chapter Six: Lucretia

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Oxford, 1881:

Officially, no-one had told Sam anything. While Miss Hope had been pouring her heart out to John Danvers, and Ellini had been confiding in Manda, people had been handing Sam very boring and ordinary pieces of information – and he'd had to shout at them for half an hour before they would give him even that. But he had enough pieces of the puzzle to make out the general shape, even if he was lacking some crucial details.

The hundreds of dead women buried in the caves at Cherry Hinton under the name Charlotte Grey were his biggest clue. They were horribly suggestive, even if they couldn't talk. He knew now that they had been worked to death, and that they'd had their fingernails removed, for some ceremonial or practical purpose. He knew Ellini Syal had been one of them, because she had no fingernails, and she got dressed up as the mythical Charlotte Grey of the Cherry Hinton caves to go scrambling over the rooftops at night.

He knew too that she was a decoy. She was keeping those gargoyles occupied while something very important went on elsewhere. So it didn't seem like too much of a leap of the imagination to suppose that there were other slave-girls – living ones – somewhere, and that Ellini Syal was keeping the gargoyles busy while they escaped.

But if she was doing something like that, why wouldn't she say so? Why would you need to lie about freeing slaves? Anybody would have helped her. Sam would have helped her, if he'd known.

No, there had to be something else. The slave-girls were dangerous, perhaps. Or she intended to do something dangerous with them.

He was quite certain that Manda knew, but Ellini had won her over, somehow. They were embroiled in some mysterious female conspiracy, and Sam was not invited. But he was reluctant to interfere, because he trusted Manda. She had ways of working – strange, persistent, emotional, intuitive ways – which were unfathomable to him, but which nevertheless seemed to work. 

He was starting to believe that something complicated and important was happening, and that the culprits might be lost forever if he went blundering in and tried to arrest them now. Miss Syal's life was hanging by a thread too – she walked jerkily about the streets of Oxford like someone already dead – and, much as she infuriated him, Sam didn't want to see another brilliantly sensitive young woman kill herself.

And, strangely, nobody seemed in too much of a hurry to get these cases solved. New visitors were arriving in the city every day, attracted by the demons and the improperly-dressed young woman who was fleeing from them. They were spending so much money that the city traders were making almost as much profit during the long vacation as they did when the students came back to the city at Michaelmas, determined to drink every tavern dry before they so much as opened a book.

It was annoying, but it suited his purposes for now. If, however, all this patience left him, in the end, with no gargoyles in the cells, he was going to start shouting as he had never shouted before. Even the dreaming spires would be forced to wake up.

Manda came to visit him at the police station every week, and gave him rather vague reports. The men liked having her there. They said a mourner on the premises helped things flow better – and, because they were hardened, ex-military men, who disliked the mention of the word 'emotion', they couldn't be induced to be any more explicit than that. But she got a cup of tea from Constable Gleeson – whose young, wobbly face became even pinker at the sight of her – and, to Sam's annoyance, they let her wait in his office when he wasn't in, as though they thought she was his wife.

Today, she was in a good mood. He could tell because she was cheerfully inspecting every object on his desk – picking up reports and paper-weights and loaded revolvers as though she hadn't seen them in months and wanted to catch up with all their news.

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