Post by No Face on Mar 31, 2024 19:32:03 GMT -5
(Adeline's first day at the Watchful Citizen.)
The day's drizzle was not a thunderous downpour, but all the same the uneven streets on the way to High Bath Lane were a string of lakes. The wet meant that, as before, Adeline wouldn't see much of the locals before reaching 171.
The building had two storeys aboveground (what was up above?), and of course its dreary basement, and its soot-caked brick exterior was darker and somehow more dignified in the rain.
It was Mary again who opened the door for her. Without her apron this time, Mary had braided her hair and the long plait hung heavy over one shoulder. Her blouse was a lightweight blue tartan with muted tones, and her skirt was calf-length and dark blue, slim and probably put together by her own hands and skill.
Downstairs, past the boiler, the biggest change was that a desk had been cleared off, and three squeaky chairs, too. Someone had made tea in a chip-spouted pot, and there were a trio of ceramic cups.
Tilmund Thackard was pacing.
True to her word, Adeline Webber returned to 171 High Bath Lane at the exact time as yesterday. Unlike her meeting with Father McKellen at the Knightsbridge house, she was prepared for the London drizzle and the mini craters in the walkway with thick boots and a higher-than usual hemmed skirt to protect her feet and shins. Remembering the heat of the boiler, she pinned her hair into a neat and tight chignon and made sure that her light blue blouse was of a breathable material.
“Thank you.” She said to Mary while stepping in.
Remaining silent until she made it downstairs and past the boiler, Adeline noted the changes in the room. “You didn’t have to clean up on my account.” She said.
Thackard stopped short and turned around at the sound of the new voice.
Mary shot Adeline a droll look--a scowl, for certain, tempered with humor. Awareness. The "newsroom" was a pigsty. "I cleaned up on the desk's account," she told Adeline. How different were they in age? It wasn't much. "It couldn't take one clipping more."
Up through the sea of shifted stacks, Thackard's hello was: "Who's paying you?"
Mary didn't quite roll her eyes, but a ghost of that exact maneuver hovered nearby. "Let's get her sitting first, Til, or I shouldn't have opened the door."
Something about the informality of it all was pleasing. There was no “Mister Thackard” and “Miss Rollins”. No “my apologies for my rudeness.” Or “this place is quite dirty, I wasn’t expecting company.” Their dynamic felt comfortable, and messy, and real in a way that Adeline hadn’t encountered since the Indra. The closest she saw in comparison were the small exchanges between the Flynn twins and Aurelia when most people were not paying attention. Already this felt much more her speed in comparison to the company of certain others.
Enough so that Adeline took a seat and pulled out her notepad and pencil from the little kit left for her at Flynn & Flynn.
“I believe that is a good place to start.” She agreed with Mary with a little smirk at the corner of her lips.
Mary picked the chair situated to the left of Adeline, off the short end of the desk and went ahead with pouring the tea. With the boiler blistering back near the stairs even at this tail end of summer, there surely was never going to be a shortage of ways to heat water in here.
Tilmund Thackard hesitated, but watched Mary's straightforward movements for a moment before something about them allowed him to let go of at least a little tension and come to join them. "I'm serious," he said--to Mary, it seemed, with a frown. "If she doesn't want to get paid, someone's paying her. We should know who it is."
Up close, Thackard didn't smell so great. There was a sweatiness, the humidity of the building not doing him any favors. His dull waistcoat was missing two buttons, and a few clear mendings had saved some of the buttonholes and one of the seams at his right shoulder.
"She is sitting right here." Adeline said directly to Thackard. "And no one is paying me. I'm here because I want to know more about the Pharos. How and where they made it, whose involved, and, most importantly, what they're planning on doing with it."
Her gaze flickered around the stacks and stacks of paper before back to Mary and Thackard.
"And if helping you all along the way is a part of that, then I don't see an issue."
He looked at her. What he did not smell of was alcohol. The man watching her was dead sober, and still giving a sense of flightiness even though he was now relatively still, sitting across from her. "Are you an heiress, then? Or do you take in washing, or...?"
"If you must know, I have a small sum of money that I've collected and saved over the years." She said. "I live well below my means. It is not a lavish life but it gets me by. I am not asking for your money nor do I need it."
He looked at Mary. Mary pushed one of the heavy little cups toward Adeline, and poured a second for Tilmund before pushing that toward him, too. She met his gaze and said, "You could interview her for her qualifications," the girl pointed out, "as you said before. Make it formal. Or you can go on biting your nails, Til, but I think you'll grow frail from blood loss after a while."
The man winced but took up his tea cup and eyed Adeline again. "I know you want what I know about the Pharos, but you see the dilemma? I don't like drawing the wrong attention. The wrong attention is the wrong attention. The wrong attention comes 'round with clubs and lawsuits."
The cup was brought up to her lips but not drank. Instead, she tilted it just enough to get a smell of its contents first before lowering it back down.
"Then let us do the interview." Adeline said after a moment. "You'll get a measure of who I am and you can decide if what you know is worth the risk of grabbing the wrong attention."
Mary poured a third cup for herself last, just as Tilmund's eyes took on a frazzled panic.
Sighing, the girl left her cup, pushing up and scraping her chair back. She went to the next desk over and grabbed the notebook she'd brought him the day before--with pencil--and practically put both into his free hand. He'd taken a sip of the tea and set it down, scanning what was, apparently, his own spidery handwriting spilling down that page. "Ah. Yes. Very well. Right." He flicked a look at Adeline and a shuddering goofy little laugh tittered up out of him. "Didn't quite expect it. You taking me up on the interview idea."
"Well," Adeline's smile was contained just to her eyes. "I was not expecting an interview so it seems we are both starting out on a level playing field, Thackard. I am up for this challenge if you are."
Then her gaze went to Mary with the same look. "What say you?"
Mary sat back down and took up her tea again. She met Adeline's eyes. She controlled it better, was more self-contained about it, but her gaze was just as searching as that of Tilmund Thackard. "I say you're either desperate or a spy," she said flatly. "But I can't think why anyone would send a spy when all they'd have to do is have us evicted and claim all the property."
"Desperate could be one way of wording it." She replied. "Would you also like to take part in the interview?" Adeline looked at Mary a little differently now. How much younger was she? It couldn't be much. But there was a shrewdness that made Adeline believe there was more to her than what met the eye.
"I've been on my feet all morning," Mary told her flatly, toasting informally with a lift of her teacup. "I'm here to stay."
Thackard cleared his throat. His chair's pivot spring gave a fearsome wrenching creak when he leaned back in it, the notepad propped on his knee. He managed the silhouette of a dignified man, but the colors of him remained washed out and a little unhealthy. "Well, then. Perhaps you might begin by stating why you sought employment with the Times of London. In lieu, of course, of a standard letter of reference from those panting neutered dogs in the stinking oubliette they call a newsroom over there."
"Oh." That word was spoken with a little bubble of laughter. "That was to take the mickey to my mother. She wanted a more traditional lifestyle for myself whereas I wanted quite the opposite. I was a very good writer and I thought what better way to put that to use than to have my name splashed everywhere for her to see in the morning paper. The Times of London was popular enough to fit the bill, so I went to work there."
Mary's cheeks tightened up with the smile she was fighting.
Thackard stared at Adeline as if she were speaking Chinese for a moment before he glanced down at his notepad and scribbled something in a shaky hand on the paper. When he was finished--or just before--he said, "I see," like an aloof professor and immediately dotted an i or struck a period with a fierce thok! of his pencil against his note. "Of what work there were you most proud, then?" He met her eyes. On this question, with that look, something settled in his brown eyes, and there was a hint there of a man who had once been one of the most respected newsmen in the country. Just a hint.
"The dragon story." Adeline replied without hesitation. "I've never written anything as true as what happened that day. It is my most honest piece of work."
"I did some digging about you," Thackard said, "after you left yesterday. I've seen your other work. Tell me about that one. Tell me how you came to write it, how you got it past them."
A somberness worked its way over Adeline; the way it always did when similar questions were asked. "Because I was there." She said a little softly before clearing her throat. Speaking louder, she continued. "I was at St. Martin's church when a portal opened, and a fire breathing dragon and a knight came through."
Adeline told them the story of the dragon and the knight. She told them of the flames and destruction. Her parents huddled together against the walls of the church and that fateful moment when she picked up the sword.
"I wrote the story the next day." she continued. "But I knew they wouldn't publish it. My editor was already pushing to run a piece about a blown gas line. I wrote the two stories. Gave the lie to the editor to approve and review. And I switched the stories right before it went to printing."
Adeline, down in the dank basement of 171, found herself a rapt audience.
Mary Rollins forgot her cup and stared, fixated, asking no questions. Tilmund Thackard was jotting notes at first, but less and less as she told her tale until his pencil stopped altogether. Where Mary was left wide-eyed, he was left squinting across the clean desk at Adeline.
"I know it was no gas leak," Thackard told Adeline gravely. "And I've seen many a strange thing, now. Many a horror. But a dragon? A rampage of such a fantastical kind? From where? By whom? How was it done, or was it always there?" His silence did not suggest that he was truly done talking, and a second later he said, "In this business, it's no longer enough to state what happened. Evidence has become a battlefield. Evidence. Did you have evidence beyond your own eyes? What became of this sword? This knight? Do your parents and the other survivors speak of this incident amongst themselves, as they are clearly not raising any alarm publicly?"
“A family of magicians were at war with one another is what brought the dragon to our world.” Adeline explained. “I don’t know how. I only know that the knight, the sword, and the dragon are gone, and I’ve seen nothing of either family. It’s possible they took their feud out of London to somewhere else.”
To the question of the people, Adeline sighed heavily.
“I’ve tried speaking to those that were there that night – the ones that survived. None of them were willing to believe the truth. The general consensus is that there was a blast of fire and entirely possible that it was a gas leak, which is why they believe they thought they saw a dragon.”
Mary did most of the reacting to the "family of magicians" and the certainty in Adeline's tone. It was not the full-blown, slack-jawed bewilderment that one could easily have expected, but it was bewilderment of a kind nevertheless, and though the girl's head did not turn, her eyes were going from Adeline to Tilmund Thackard and back again.
What he said was: "None were willing to believe the truth, or none were willing to admit the truth? On record? To you?" A little of that tiny ghost of sharp-eyed cunning sparked again. Short-lived as it was, it was there long enough for the big man to ask, "Who cleaned up the site? Did they remove anything? Destroy anything? That explosion was all over the news--who persuaded the inquisitive--our so-called colleagues--to look elsewhere?"
"I don't know." Adeline admitted. "There were, uh, other pressing matters that required my attention specifically hunting down the dragon and helping the knight."
She took in a deep breath.
"If I had to guess who might have been involved with the clean up - Slake's office is the first that comes to mind."
He sat still for perhaps the first time in Adeline's company, the eraser of his pencil pressed to his lower lip.
It didn't last. The stillness broke first with a quick fidget with the pencil, and then the fidgeting grew.
"I do know that name," he said, "but not related to St. Martin's."
"How do you know the name?" She asked looking between Mary and Thackard.
He was up and away again with a wrench of his chair spring, and Mary's head dipped forward as if it had suddenly turned to stone. He was saying, "There were disappearances! I was following a lead to one of the people I believe to have been responsible for what happened to Mary, when I came across a list of transfers from military hierarchies to a civilian one. Which didn't make sense at all. One of the names on the list--later, I came across a petition by a Mrs P Thelderman, asking Aerofleet Command after the state of a return of her son's remains, and I remembered that odd name--'Thelderman'--from that transfer list. Name on the transfer orders were all 'Lewis,' which I never found any source for, and--hold on--Mary--"
"I don't know where the list is, Til," Mary told him without getting up. She met Adeline's eyes. It was not amused, and it was not conspiratorial. It was assessing--of Adeline. Of what she was making of this sudden and total left turn from her interview.
"--but there was no Lewis heading any agency--and the list didn't name any agency for this mysterious Lewis, which was another thing that was out of order--" Thackard was getting farther away, calling back to them while he prowled his colossal heaps toward the far end of the pressroom. "... but a friend of mine tipped me off to a meeting--we're not friends any longer--" He ducked low to pull up a stack of files from the floor, still going. "... a Lewis was listed on the arrival sheet, but I knew all the other names, and I knew their faces. When they left the building just one didn't fit, so that was Lewis, but some squinty little bowler-hat aide or something was calling him Slake when I followed them, so I started a new file...."
It was true, she wasn't expecting Thackard to switch gears so quickly. The interview wasn't as much of an interview that she initially thought. Trying her best to follow with him, Adeline wrote down her own notes while nodding along.
"So, Lewis and Slake are the same?" She asked with a quick glance up from her notes. "And he's not military. I've seen enough of him to know that he's not." Realizing how that sounded, Adeline set the pencil down and looked at Mary and then at Thackard before back at Mary.
"My interactions with Slake started just a few months ago on the day that everyone forgot." She explained.
"I've seen enough of him to know that he's not."
She was putting her pencil down as Thackard stood up straight, quick like he'd been stung, and stared back up the length of the room toward her.
"Interactions--plural?"
"Multiple throughout the day." Adeline answered. "Nothing before or since then."
That pause in the mad rush for whatever file the man was actually looking for held, as he picked backwards through the implications. "The day that everyone forgot. The day that everyone forgot?"
Adeline recited the day that the Alfar made its attack and waited to see what Thackard and Mary thought of it.
By the time she was done, the boiler was the only noise in the building beyond the occasional conference of rats.
Mary finally blew out a breath. "Something stronger than tea, next time."
"I am aware of how insane these next words are but they are the truth. A very powerful Faerie attacked the world and put it to sleep. Only a select few were awake for one reason or another - I was among them. Slake was as well." She shifted in her seat.
"That is how I met him and that is how I know of him."
Slowly, Thackard came back to the desk, sat, and took up his notepad and pencil again.
His sudden foray away from the the interview had been kicked off entirely by six words: How do you know the name? and his return to it was in a sort of fixated daze.
"I remember hauling leaves down the stairs to the alley," Mary said in a small voice. "How strange that was."
"Tropical Spores--or what have you--my ass," Thackard muttered. "But a fairy? And a dragon?" He looked at Mary.
Mary, who stared right back at him.
"Did you ever see such things," he asked her, "before--before?"
The girl shook her head. "No. It wasn't like from a story."
"I have." Adeline confessed. "There's more that's happening than what meets the eye. Faeries are real as are dragons. Magic and magicians. All of these things exist. I believe Slake and his men are in charge of feeling these things out, accessing how much of a danger they are to the Crown. But what I don't know is the Pharos and what they intend to do with it."
Silence again. These were the sorts of topics that sent thoughts spinning.
Thackard blinked slow, and said very carefully, "The Pharos is Aerofleet. Glanning was paid by Aerofleet. There was some contact between this mystery agency at Whitehall and Glanning, but I don't understand it, and I don't think it means the ship is now under the banner of whatever that agency is." He cocked his head. "Unless you have evidence to the contrary."
"I don't." Her head shook. "I've only started at the beginning of this journey. Right now, I feel like I'm stumbling in the dark and you're the first light I've spotted."
He sat opposite Adeline, only the teapot and their cups between them.
Always before, his looks at her were almost glancing somehow, as if he couldn't quite work up the guts to really see her for more than a few seconds at a time. Now he looked her over, the most like a man doing an interview that he'd seemed yet. It was more serious than that, by the look on his face. And Mary watched him as this little change fell across him.
Softly, he asked, "Why didn't you pursue further the matter of the destroyed church?"
"Because the dragon killed my best friend and took her face." Adeline replied. "Because that Knight was thrown into a mental ward and needed my help." She sucked in a hard breath. "Because there were other matters that I had to see through first and there was not enough space to investigate the St. Martin's."
Every time she answered, that stillness came. This time the break was Thackard leaning toward Mary to ask lowly, "Which of us is crazier?"
"Still you, Til," Mary said softly back, with a fondness that was a little tired, too.
"You don't have to believe me." Adeline said feeling tired herself. "But it's the truth."
"I want to believe you." Thackard stated it simply. "Our job, as truth-tellers, is to not fear truth that happens to be strange. It's also our job not to bow immediately to what we want to believe ourselves. If you work here, you will not drop a story. Whatever the trouble of it."
"What happens if my stories bring the wrong kind of attention?" Adeline asked.
"That's--" Thackard's hand shook, and he started to drag it off the desk into his lap where it would not be seen, but Mary's hand slapped down fast over his much larger one, and her fingers tightened even as she nodded to him. "That's--how you know--you're doing it right."
Feeling a somberness coming over her, Adeline nodded slowly. "Then I'm in." She quickly added. "If you'll have me, that is."
"Trial basis," Thackard said--hesitating over that. The assessing stare was gone again; he looked down and up at her face and down again.
Mary inclined her head as if that made it easier to see him, though it couldn't have. She looked to Adeline far more steadily than he currently could. "Are you good with maths?"
"I am." she nodded. "I had a governess growing up and then was sent off to finishing school where I completed the rest of my education. I can also read and speak Latin, Italian, and French."
The day's drizzle was not a thunderous downpour, but all the same the uneven streets on the way to High Bath Lane were a string of lakes. The wet meant that, as before, Adeline wouldn't see much of the locals before reaching 171.
The building had two storeys aboveground (what was up above?), and of course its dreary basement, and its soot-caked brick exterior was darker and somehow more dignified in the rain.
It was Mary again who opened the door for her. Without her apron this time, Mary had braided her hair and the long plait hung heavy over one shoulder. Her blouse was a lightweight blue tartan with muted tones, and her skirt was calf-length and dark blue, slim and probably put together by her own hands and skill.
Downstairs, past the boiler, the biggest change was that a desk had been cleared off, and three squeaky chairs, too. Someone had made tea in a chip-spouted pot, and there were a trio of ceramic cups.
Tilmund Thackard was pacing.
True to her word, Adeline Webber returned to 171 High Bath Lane at the exact time as yesterday. Unlike her meeting with Father McKellen at the Knightsbridge house, she was prepared for the London drizzle and the mini craters in the walkway with thick boots and a higher-than usual hemmed skirt to protect her feet and shins. Remembering the heat of the boiler, she pinned her hair into a neat and tight chignon and made sure that her light blue blouse was of a breathable material.
“Thank you.” She said to Mary while stepping in.
Remaining silent until she made it downstairs and past the boiler, Adeline noted the changes in the room. “You didn’t have to clean up on my account.” She said.
Thackard stopped short and turned around at the sound of the new voice.
Mary shot Adeline a droll look--a scowl, for certain, tempered with humor. Awareness. The "newsroom" was a pigsty. "I cleaned up on the desk's account," she told Adeline. How different were they in age? It wasn't much. "It couldn't take one clipping more."
Up through the sea of shifted stacks, Thackard's hello was: "Who's paying you?"
Mary didn't quite roll her eyes, but a ghost of that exact maneuver hovered nearby. "Let's get her sitting first, Til, or I shouldn't have opened the door."
Something about the informality of it all was pleasing. There was no “Mister Thackard” and “Miss Rollins”. No “my apologies for my rudeness.” Or “this place is quite dirty, I wasn’t expecting company.” Their dynamic felt comfortable, and messy, and real in a way that Adeline hadn’t encountered since the Indra. The closest she saw in comparison were the small exchanges between the Flynn twins and Aurelia when most people were not paying attention. Already this felt much more her speed in comparison to the company of certain others.
Enough so that Adeline took a seat and pulled out her notepad and pencil from the little kit left for her at Flynn & Flynn.
“I believe that is a good place to start.” She agreed with Mary with a little smirk at the corner of her lips.
Mary picked the chair situated to the left of Adeline, off the short end of the desk and went ahead with pouring the tea. With the boiler blistering back near the stairs even at this tail end of summer, there surely was never going to be a shortage of ways to heat water in here.
Tilmund Thackard hesitated, but watched Mary's straightforward movements for a moment before something about them allowed him to let go of at least a little tension and come to join them. "I'm serious," he said--to Mary, it seemed, with a frown. "If she doesn't want to get paid, someone's paying her. We should know who it is."
Up close, Thackard didn't smell so great. There was a sweatiness, the humidity of the building not doing him any favors. His dull waistcoat was missing two buttons, and a few clear mendings had saved some of the buttonholes and one of the seams at his right shoulder.
"She is sitting right here." Adeline said directly to Thackard. "And no one is paying me. I'm here because I want to know more about the Pharos. How and where they made it, whose involved, and, most importantly, what they're planning on doing with it."
Her gaze flickered around the stacks and stacks of paper before back to Mary and Thackard.
"And if helping you all along the way is a part of that, then I don't see an issue."
He looked at her. What he did not smell of was alcohol. The man watching her was dead sober, and still giving a sense of flightiness even though he was now relatively still, sitting across from her. "Are you an heiress, then? Or do you take in washing, or...?"
"If you must know, I have a small sum of money that I've collected and saved over the years." She said. "I live well below my means. It is not a lavish life but it gets me by. I am not asking for your money nor do I need it."
He looked at Mary. Mary pushed one of the heavy little cups toward Adeline, and poured a second for Tilmund before pushing that toward him, too. She met his gaze and said, "You could interview her for her qualifications," the girl pointed out, "as you said before. Make it formal. Or you can go on biting your nails, Til, but I think you'll grow frail from blood loss after a while."
The man winced but took up his tea cup and eyed Adeline again. "I know you want what I know about the Pharos, but you see the dilemma? I don't like drawing the wrong attention. The wrong attention is the wrong attention. The wrong attention comes 'round with clubs and lawsuits."
The cup was brought up to her lips but not drank. Instead, she tilted it just enough to get a smell of its contents first before lowering it back down.
"Then let us do the interview." Adeline said after a moment. "You'll get a measure of who I am and you can decide if what you know is worth the risk of grabbing the wrong attention."
Mary poured a third cup for herself last, just as Tilmund's eyes took on a frazzled panic.
Sighing, the girl left her cup, pushing up and scraping her chair back. She went to the next desk over and grabbed the notebook she'd brought him the day before--with pencil--and practically put both into his free hand. He'd taken a sip of the tea and set it down, scanning what was, apparently, his own spidery handwriting spilling down that page. "Ah. Yes. Very well. Right." He flicked a look at Adeline and a shuddering goofy little laugh tittered up out of him. "Didn't quite expect it. You taking me up on the interview idea."
"Well," Adeline's smile was contained just to her eyes. "I was not expecting an interview so it seems we are both starting out on a level playing field, Thackard. I am up for this challenge if you are."
Then her gaze went to Mary with the same look. "What say you?"
Mary sat back down and took up her tea again. She met Adeline's eyes. She controlled it better, was more self-contained about it, but her gaze was just as searching as that of Tilmund Thackard. "I say you're either desperate or a spy," she said flatly. "But I can't think why anyone would send a spy when all they'd have to do is have us evicted and claim all the property."
"Desperate could be one way of wording it." She replied. "Would you also like to take part in the interview?" Adeline looked at Mary a little differently now. How much younger was she? It couldn't be much. But there was a shrewdness that made Adeline believe there was more to her than what met the eye.
"I've been on my feet all morning," Mary told her flatly, toasting informally with a lift of her teacup. "I'm here to stay."
Thackard cleared his throat. His chair's pivot spring gave a fearsome wrenching creak when he leaned back in it, the notepad propped on his knee. He managed the silhouette of a dignified man, but the colors of him remained washed out and a little unhealthy. "Well, then. Perhaps you might begin by stating why you sought employment with the Times of London. In lieu, of course, of a standard letter of reference from those panting neutered dogs in the stinking oubliette they call a newsroom over there."
"Oh." That word was spoken with a little bubble of laughter. "That was to take the mickey to my mother. She wanted a more traditional lifestyle for myself whereas I wanted quite the opposite. I was a very good writer and I thought what better way to put that to use than to have my name splashed everywhere for her to see in the morning paper. The Times of London was popular enough to fit the bill, so I went to work there."
Mary's cheeks tightened up with the smile she was fighting.
Thackard stared at Adeline as if she were speaking Chinese for a moment before he glanced down at his notepad and scribbled something in a shaky hand on the paper. When he was finished--or just before--he said, "I see," like an aloof professor and immediately dotted an i or struck a period with a fierce thok! of his pencil against his note. "Of what work there were you most proud, then?" He met her eyes. On this question, with that look, something settled in his brown eyes, and there was a hint there of a man who had once been one of the most respected newsmen in the country. Just a hint.
"The dragon story." Adeline replied without hesitation. "I've never written anything as true as what happened that day. It is my most honest piece of work."
"I did some digging about you," Thackard said, "after you left yesterday. I've seen your other work. Tell me about that one. Tell me how you came to write it, how you got it past them."
A somberness worked its way over Adeline; the way it always did when similar questions were asked. "Because I was there." She said a little softly before clearing her throat. Speaking louder, she continued. "I was at St. Martin's church when a portal opened, and a fire breathing dragon and a knight came through."
Adeline told them the story of the dragon and the knight. She told them of the flames and destruction. Her parents huddled together against the walls of the church and that fateful moment when she picked up the sword.
"I wrote the story the next day." she continued. "But I knew they wouldn't publish it. My editor was already pushing to run a piece about a blown gas line. I wrote the two stories. Gave the lie to the editor to approve and review. And I switched the stories right before it went to printing."
Adeline, down in the dank basement of 171, found herself a rapt audience.
Mary Rollins forgot her cup and stared, fixated, asking no questions. Tilmund Thackard was jotting notes at first, but less and less as she told her tale until his pencil stopped altogether. Where Mary was left wide-eyed, he was left squinting across the clean desk at Adeline.
"I know it was no gas leak," Thackard told Adeline gravely. "And I've seen many a strange thing, now. Many a horror. But a dragon? A rampage of such a fantastical kind? From where? By whom? How was it done, or was it always there?" His silence did not suggest that he was truly done talking, and a second later he said, "In this business, it's no longer enough to state what happened. Evidence has become a battlefield. Evidence. Did you have evidence beyond your own eyes? What became of this sword? This knight? Do your parents and the other survivors speak of this incident amongst themselves, as they are clearly not raising any alarm publicly?"
“A family of magicians were at war with one another is what brought the dragon to our world.” Adeline explained. “I don’t know how. I only know that the knight, the sword, and the dragon are gone, and I’ve seen nothing of either family. It’s possible they took their feud out of London to somewhere else.”
To the question of the people, Adeline sighed heavily.
“I’ve tried speaking to those that were there that night – the ones that survived. None of them were willing to believe the truth. The general consensus is that there was a blast of fire and entirely possible that it was a gas leak, which is why they believe they thought they saw a dragon.”
Mary did most of the reacting to the "family of magicians" and the certainty in Adeline's tone. It was not the full-blown, slack-jawed bewilderment that one could easily have expected, but it was bewilderment of a kind nevertheless, and though the girl's head did not turn, her eyes were going from Adeline to Tilmund Thackard and back again.
What he said was: "None were willing to believe the truth, or none were willing to admit the truth? On record? To you?" A little of that tiny ghost of sharp-eyed cunning sparked again. Short-lived as it was, it was there long enough for the big man to ask, "Who cleaned up the site? Did they remove anything? Destroy anything? That explosion was all over the news--who persuaded the inquisitive--our so-called colleagues--to look elsewhere?"
"I don't know." Adeline admitted. "There were, uh, other pressing matters that required my attention specifically hunting down the dragon and helping the knight."
She took in a deep breath.
"If I had to guess who might have been involved with the clean up - Slake's office is the first that comes to mind."
He sat still for perhaps the first time in Adeline's company, the eraser of his pencil pressed to his lower lip.
It didn't last. The stillness broke first with a quick fidget with the pencil, and then the fidgeting grew.
"I do know that name," he said, "but not related to St. Martin's."
"How do you know the name?" She asked looking between Mary and Thackard.
He was up and away again with a wrench of his chair spring, and Mary's head dipped forward as if it had suddenly turned to stone. He was saying, "There were disappearances! I was following a lead to one of the people I believe to have been responsible for what happened to Mary, when I came across a list of transfers from military hierarchies to a civilian one. Which didn't make sense at all. One of the names on the list--later, I came across a petition by a Mrs P Thelderman, asking Aerofleet Command after the state of a return of her son's remains, and I remembered that odd name--'Thelderman'--from that transfer list. Name on the transfer orders were all 'Lewis,' which I never found any source for, and--hold on--Mary--"
"I don't know where the list is, Til," Mary told him without getting up. She met Adeline's eyes. It was not amused, and it was not conspiratorial. It was assessing--of Adeline. Of what she was making of this sudden and total left turn from her interview.
"--but there was no Lewis heading any agency--and the list didn't name any agency for this mysterious Lewis, which was another thing that was out of order--" Thackard was getting farther away, calling back to them while he prowled his colossal heaps toward the far end of the pressroom. "... but a friend of mine tipped me off to a meeting--we're not friends any longer--" He ducked low to pull up a stack of files from the floor, still going. "... a Lewis was listed on the arrival sheet, but I knew all the other names, and I knew their faces. When they left the building just one didn't fit, so that was Lewis, but some squinty little bowler-hat aide or something was calling him Slake when I followed them, so I started a new file...."
It was true, she wasn't expecting Thackard to switch gears so quickly. The interview wasn't as much of an interview that she initially thought. Trying her best to follow with him, Adeline wrote down her own notes while nodding along.
"So, Lewis and Slake are the same?" She asked with a quick glance up from her notes. "And he's not military. I've seen enough of him to know that he's not." Realizing how that sounded, Adeline set the pencil down and looked at Mary and then at Thackard before back at Mary.
"My interactions with Slake started just a few months ago on the day that everyone forgot." She explained.
"I've seen enough of him to know that he's not."
She was putting her pencil down as Thackard stood up straight, quick like he'd been stung, and stared back up the length of the room toward her.
"Interactions--plural?"
"Multiple throughout the day." Adeline answered. "Nothing before or since then."
That pause in the mad rush for whatever file the man was actually looking for held, as he picked backwards through the implications. "The day that everyone forgot. The day that everyone forgot?"
Adeline recited the day that the Alfar made its attack and waited to see what Thackard and Mary thought of it.
By the time she was done, the boiler was the only noise in the building beyond the occasional conference of rats.
Mary finally blew out a breath. "Something stronger than tea, next time."
"I am aware of how insane these next words are but they are the truth. A very powerful Faerie attacked the world and put it to sleep. Only a select few were awake for one reason or another - I was among them. Slake was as well." She shifted in her seat.
"That is how I met him and that is how I know of him."
Slowly, Thackard came back to the desk, sat, and took up his notepad and pencil again.
His sudden foray away from the the interview had been kicked off entirely by six words: How do you know the name? and his return to it was in a sort of fixated daze.
"I remember hauling leaves down the stairs to the alley," Mary said in a small voice. "How strange that was."
"Tropical Spores--or what have you--my ass," Thackard muttered. "But a fairy? And a dragon?" He looked at Mary.
Mary, who stared right back at him.
"Did you ever see such things," he asked her, "before--before?"
The girl shook her head. "No. It wasn't like from a story."
"I have." Adeline confessed. "There's more that's happening than what meets the eye. Faeries are real as are dragons. Magic and magicians. All of these things exist. I believe Slake and his men are in charge of feeling these things out, accessing how much of a danger they are to the Crown. But what I don't know is the Pharos and what they intend to do with it."
Silence again. These were the sorts of topics that sent thoughts spinning.
Thackard blinked slow, and said very carefully, "The Pharos is Aerofleet. Glanning was paid by Aerofleet. There was some contact between this mystery agency at Whitehall and Glanning, but I don't understand it, and I don't think it means the ship is now under the banner of whatever that agency is." He cocked his head. "Unless you have evidence to the contrary."
"I don't." Her head shook. "I've only started at the beginning of this journey. Right now, I feel like I'm stumbling in the dark and you're the first light I've spotted."
He sat opposite Adeline, only the teapot and their cups between them.
Always before, his looks at her were almost glancing somehow, as if he couldn't quite work up the guts to really see her for more than a few seconds at a time. Now he looked her over, the most like a man doing an interview that he'd seemed yet. It was more serious than that, by the look on his face. And Mary watched him as this little change fell across him.
Softly, he asked, "Why didn't you pursue further the matter of the destroyed church?"
"Because the dragon killed my best friend and took her face." Adeline replied. "Because that Knight was thrown into a mental ward and needed my help." She sucked in a hard breath. "Because there were other matters that I had to see through first and there was not enough space to investigate the St. Martin's."
Every time she answered, that stillness came. This time the break was Thackard leaning toward Mary to ask lowly, "Which of us is crazier?"
"Still you, Til," Mary said softly back, with a fondness that was a little tired, too.
"You don't have to believe me." Adeline said feeling tired herself. "But it's the truth."
"I want to believe you." Thackard stated it simply. "Our job, as truth-tellers, is to not fear truth that happens to be strange. It's also our job not to bow immediately to what we want to believe ourselves. If you work here, you will not drop a story. Whatever the trouble of it."
"What happens if my stories bring the wrong kind of attention?" Adeline asked.
"That's--" Thackard's hand shook, and he started to drag it off the desk into his lap where it would not be seen, but Mary's hand slapped down fast over his much larger one, and her fingers tightened even as she nodded to him. "That's--how you know--you're doing it right."
Feeling a somberness coming over her, Adeline nodded slowly. "Then I'm in." She quickly added. "If you'll have me, that is."
"Trial basis," Thackard said--hesitating over that. The assessing stare was gone again; he looked down and up at her face and down again.
Mary inclined her head as if that made it easier to see him, though it couldn't have. She looked to Adeline far more steadily than he currently could. "Are you good with maths?"
"I am." she nodded. "I had a governess growing up and then was sent off to finishing school where I completed the rest of my education. I can also read and speak Latin, Italian, and French."