After spending the past month as a cheerful amnesiac, drinking gin and making jokes while his world disintegrated, Jack Cade finally has his memories back. That means he knows exactly who Ellini Syal is, and how he feels about her. Unfortunately, he...
A fascinating idea was working its way to the surface of Jack's mind, like a dead body that hadn't been properly weighted down. It occurred to him that, if he couldn't stop the pain, he might still share it. He deserved most of it, of course, but there were people who had brought him to this – people who had hurt Ellini almost as much as he had. Alice and Sergei had used him to destroy everything he'd ever loved, and they weren't down here, shivering in the dark water.
They probably didn't even know what had happened.
It seemed impossible that they could have gone on with their daily lives while everything had been stripped away from him, layer by excruciating layer, as if he was being flayed by instalments – but this was probably the case.
They didn't even know what they'd done to him.
And, almost at the same moment, he thought about the intimate knowledge of the city that had been leading him around all night, guiding his feet to the cursed room, the Trill Mill Stream, when all he had been aware of was unbearable pain.
He had planned for this, hadn't he? Well, not this exactly – who could have planned for this? – but he had planned for trouble. It was more than secret passageways and hiding places. He had been cataloguing every weakness, uncovering every secret, planning riots, robberies, blackmail and extortion in obsessive detail for five years.
It had been keeping him sane. It was still trying to keep him sane, in the back of his mind, while the world crumbled.
He pulled himself out of the water and tried to remember the path that would take him directly under the Faculty. The ground beneath the city was honeycombed with hollows – cellars and sewers and crypts. They all joined up, or could be made to do so with a well-placed masonry hammer. And Jack couldn't have thought of stashing weapons around the city without also thinking to stash tools.
And now he knew the rooftops. He could get from one side of this city to the other without ever being seen in the streets.
When he got the Faculty, he cleaned out his own room first, putting off the horrible moment when he would have to face hers. He bundled all the papers, letters and maps into a sack, all the time swinging between plaintive longing and white-hot rage. There were times – usually when there was nothing left to smash or tear – when he just stared up at the ceiling and thought: "Please – please, this isn't real. Please take it back. Please make it not have happened."
And then the stupidity of it – the humiliating absurdity of pleading with the ceiling – would dawn on him, and he would go back to ripping and tearing. A lot of his notes would need to be pieced back together like jigsaw puzzles, but he would have years for that, wouldn't he? He was never going to die. He might as well invent some kind of useful occupation.
When he bent to lever up the floorboards for Lily's last letter, one solitary piece of paper slithered down from his overflowing sack. He glanced at it, not expecting it to make any sense at first. Usually, it took him five or ten minutes to decode his scribbled notes, but this one was fairly readable. He'd written it – what, three years ago? – when it had occurred to him that the Professors of Oxford didn't feel pain like ordinary people, and might need a special method of execution if you wanted to get rid of them.
He had never really connected the thought with Sergei or Alice – or with anyone in particular. It was just a thought experiment, just a piece of knowledge that might be useful for the Jack Cade who lived in his head, and still had the energy to exploit people.
Still, glancing down the list, it was obvious that he must have hated Sergei and Alice, even then. There was a touch of spitefulness in the details.
He left it behind, pausing to check off 'Step One: Discredit their work', which, of course, he'd already done by killing somebody. Two people, actually. That old man with the grotesque tan--
He doubled up with bitter rage again, but he'd been expecting it this time, and it only took a few moments to pass. At least he'd had the pleasure of killing that bastard – although he hadn't known enough to properly enjoy it at the time.
He dragged the sack to Ellini's room, and collected her belongings: the terracotta-red dress that had seemed like the unscalable walls of a fortress, the mint-green one that had made her look like a delicious, cooling dessert. Everything he touched in that room was a torment, but he couldn't stand to think of her things being pawed over by Alice and Sarah – maybe saved for dusters, or given to the rag and bone man. This was all that was left of her now. And, judging by the fact that he couldn't die, they were going to have to last him for a very long time.
And then there was the doll. It took him a long time to summon up the courage to even look at it. She had poured so much of her soul into that doll – told it so many stories, taken so much care over its reconstruction – that looking into those painted eyes would almost be like looking into hers.
And yet there was a pull there too. Because nothing else was like looking into her eyes, or ever would be again. And, sure enough, when he did manage to drag his gaze up to the doll's fractured face, there was so much of her in it that it was a comfort and a reproach at the same time.
Good, he thought, bundling it into the sack with a little more care that he had used on all the other objects. Fine. He didn't want to feel better. He just wanted to feel like she wasn't gone. The doll could stare at him all it wanted – it could drive hot needles into his eyes, for all he cared – as long as it still reminded him of Ellini while it did so.
He made his way back down the grand oak staircase, tracing the route that he had mapped out, footstep-by-footstep, in quieter times, to avoid the tell-tale creaks.
He glanced in at Sergei and Alice's rooms on his way down, but they were empty. If they had been in their beds, he would have killed them – he was under no illusions about that. He told himself that they had, in their very different ways, been kind to Ellini. Sergei had bought her that dress and told her to marry just as her heart directed her. And Alice had stopped the gargoyle--
Jack doubled up as though he'd been punched in the stomach, clutching the banister for support. For a moment, he heard the whole structure creak. He saw the mess and pain and loud noises that would follow if he just fell. And for a split second, they were quite appealing. All this stillness was insane – insufferable – insulting. Didn't they know that the world was over? He wanted to snatch every sleeping servant out of bed and wring the utmost drop of agony from them. At least then, someone in the world would know a fraction of what he felt like.
But the time wasn't right yet. And, anyway, what was the point in throttling servants? Had he made all those plans just to throttle servants? He needed to wait for the moment when he could do the most damage. There would be plenty of mess and pain and loud noises then.
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