Morning Over a Bookshop

“Tra la la, the Starveling Cat! Sharp as… something! Blunt as a—OH!”

Oh, excuse me miss. Am I intruding?

“Who are you and what have you done with Aspasia, you brute? Stay back, this is the finest Rattus Faberware and it’s quite loaded!”

I passed Aspasia on the stairs saying that she was off to the Bazaar to procure eggs and Rubbery Lumps for two. As she neglected to mention which other party she meant to feed with them, I presumed it to be myself. However, as I see this is not the case I will leave you both to your pleasantries.

“Oh… no, please, sit down! If you’re a friend of hers then I should offer you a cup of tea at the very least. May I ask your name?”

I am Mister Tiddles. A pleasure to meet you.

“Oh, of course! I do beg your pardon. She has mentioned you before but I had thought that you were one of those cats she always seems to be talking to in the street. Though I did wonder how a cat could have come to be a three-time Ring of Roses champion.”

Most fighting cats claim that their secret lies in the back legs, though I have met some proficient in conventional boxing. But you still have me at a disadvantage regarding your own name.

“Oh, I’m no one you’re likely to have heard of. In most circles I’m more famous for the curve of my… well.”

Yes. Er.

“Perhaps I should put some clothes on before we continue.”

There seems to be a purple gown halfway under the chaise lounge…

“Er. Yes, that would be mine. Thank you. So how is it that you know Aspasia?”

I fell from a rooftop fighting match onto a cat of her acquaintance whilst they were conversing. He was sadly slain by the force of my fall but he gifted me his name with his dying breath.

“An honour, if a bit ghoulish. Then, I suppose cats go in a great deal for both those things. Oh, here’s your tea. Do you take sugar?”

No, thank you love. I had best finish this and be going at any rate. I should hate to think of the two of you put off by my presence.

“Between you and the Rubbery Men of my acquaintance I’m beginning to think that the politest men aren’t men at all. Are all of your own species this accommodating?”

I’m afraid I could hardly say, being unaware of my own past or place of origin. Certainly I’ve never met anyone in the Neath who looks remotely like me save a few unsavoury sea monsters.

“How dreadful! I know the secretary of a certain Implacable Detective who might be persuaded to aid your search…”

It hardly concerns me at the present time, but my thanks for the offer regardless.

“Of course. Will you be needing a cab? Aspasia has a cat she pays to hail them from the window.”

As I live in the opposite flat that would hardly be necessary. Good morning, young miss.

“Good morning, Mister Tiddles. A pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

Snow in the Neath? Snow in the Neath.

“Oh dear. Here come the carollers again.”

Shall I fetch the boiling pitch?

“I’m afraid we’ve run out since last Knife-and-Candle night. Such prolonged exposure to the snow should catch up to them in any case.”

I found a rat half-frozen in a drift of it this morning. The poor creature seemed to be clawing out its own eyes.

“At least snow on the surface could only—will you hold still? I only have so much salve!”

Terribly sorry, love.

“How you manage to stagger back here in such a state every morning I can hardly imagine. With this many slashes you look like a cut-paper fancy you could buy at the Bazaar for a penny.”

I assure you I’m worth much more than that as an objet d’art.

“Of course you are. To this end I may need you to accompany me in a decorative capacity to the Duchess’s winter fete next week.”

I say, I’m hardly cut out for such events…

“Just wear your mask and no one will give it a second thought. I’ve had worse than you accompany me before. Half the guests will be our friends from the Mandrake anyhow.”

But why myself? I would be surprised if as wanton a breaker of hearts as yourself had no one else to accompany her.

“You’re so busy with your Black Ribbons and your recovering in bed every other day and such that I hardly see you anymore. And it does get so tedious having someone on one’s arm that one has to impress all night. Even with the prospect of such a thing leading to later dalliance.”

Is skulking about drunkenly in imitation of the Vake frowned upon?

“I’m sure everyone would be terribly amused. If it gets too dull we can always stage a brawl. The Duchess says nothing completes a party like at least three call-outs and a stabbing.”

Then I can certainly—good lord, I think the singing is getting worse.

“I hear boiled Neath snow has much the same effect as pitch. Let me get a saucepan.”

A Semi-Anonymous Literary Endeavor Submitted to the Unexpurgated London Gazette, October 23, 1889

My cloak is freshly laundered and only slightly damp with the chilly drops of fog that have been blowing in off the Zee since noon. I found it hanging from a stile over a mushroom field on my first day out of New Newgate and decided to keep it. The name embroidered in white (now grey) silk on the hem was “Aspasia,” which I took as a name as good as any other and appropriate to boot with my smattering of the classics.

 

I run a finger over black wool and greywhite silk before taking the bottle from the cupboard and allow the sluggish, oddly mobile black liquid to crawl downward into two mismatched glasses that I found under the floorboards in a sorrow-spider’s web along with a marble-sized lump of glim and enough human eyelashes to make up several more spiders. As I move to light a candle resting in the center of the table the door swings open and my partner in crime enters. His own cloak looks to have once been either an old tent from Mrs. Plenty’s or the cover of some mysterious and stealthy black airship, but it seems to serve him well in the enterprise of prowling. In one green-grey mottled hand he carries a packet of sugar made from the beets planted by enterprising farmers in the highest and loamiest heights of the cavern and harvested by zeppelin. As he sits I procure a tarnished silver spoonful, lighting the liquor-soaked sugar with an ease born of performing the same motion countless times (albeit with the fee noire’s inferior vert sister) at the Singing Mandrake. The flames spit and turn strange, unhealthy-looking colors before guttering out. We clink our glasses and gulp down the contents, I with a discreet cough and he with a flinch reminiscent of the time he was stabbed by an enterprising and recently deceased Knife-and-Candle player.

 

It’s true that no one seems to know the origins of the traditional post-Black Wings prowling, but the compulsion to indulge in it after partaking suggests something altogether more sinister and inescapable, as if there were a shortage of such things in Fallen London. Heads turn as we skulk. The local Spittle-Flecked Harridan scribbles down an unflattering note on her memorandum pad. Cats watch us from the tops of buildings, half amused and half exasperated. My cloak catches on a nail, ripping the last “A” in “Aspasia” and causing the Rubbery Men we have been observing to scuttle off in alarm. The slightly blacker darkness of the night around us seems suddenly new and uncanny. Streetlamps shine oily-colored prisms at strange angles onto alleys which, never inviting at the best of times, loom around us like the intestinal loops of the cavernous beast that devoured London so long ago, and we huddle together, scrutinizing every shadow for the next clue the Black Wings hints at with each fevered whisper in the back of our minds. Soon the rocking of the horizon will become unbearable and creatures that might be the shades of urchins or devils’ children or souls thrown back by spirifers or any number of other things will squirm from the gaps left by the swaying, whispering things that were never meant to be heard or even later mused on sober as we flee silently into shadows that swallow us and our black cloaks totally.

 

Fortunately these things never linger and in the morning, woken by the sniffs of the proprietous individuals on whose doorsteps we have fallen asleep, the urge to repeat the experience is undeniable.

 

-A.R

Somewhere on the Zee…

I say, love, this is something of a fix.

“The zailor I asked said the tide was coming in hours later than this! How did I know his almanac was five years out of date?”

Tut, there’s no need for shouting. I suppose we shall have to weather the night on this rock. One of your petticoats must suffice as a tent.

“Yes, I suppose there’s nothing for it. You can have the green one; it’s seen worse. What are we going to eat and drink, though?”

I’ve enough water and Morelway’s in my canteens to hold us over if we ration it. As for eating, we would do well to consume the aquatic monstrosities before they consume us. This harpoon I liberated from the fishermen should serve admirably.

“And eat them raw? I haven’t got anything for a fire, and who knows what sorts of poisons have to cook out of such things before they can be eaten.”

H’m, that is a bother. For you, at any rate. I suppose libation must be postponed until our return.

“…At least we might recover some more glim?”

I don’t suppose you could throw down a pentagram and summon that young gentleman of yours to fetch us home.

“That would be rude. Besides, he’s calling on his mother and sisters at the Embassy tonight and I’m sure they would boil me alive if I interrupted their repartee.”

Take the harpoon and keep watch, then, whilst I scout out a suitable campsite. If anything appears that possesses more mandibles or eyes than myself, shoot it.

“(sigh) If only felinomancy treated more on the mastery of water than running from it in terror…”

-A.R