Shrike halted some twelve feet from the fence. A thousand iron spears hung suspended from iron bars in a line that stretched from south to north and on through the fog beyond Shrike’s field of vision.
While made of iron and standing as tall as his own shoulders, Shrike thought he could climb the fence if he had to—by throwing his cloak over it to shield him from the corrosive metal and taking a running leap, if nothing else. Still, it could not run on forever, and so he continued northward, maintaining a wary distance from the fence as he stalked its length.
Past an enormous bronze cast of a nude warrior with unsheathed sword and upraised shield, in the furthest north-east corner of the fence, he found a three-fold marble arch—the central passage flanked by smaller twins—and beyond it London teemed.
The central arch stood wide enough for two carriages to pass through alongside. Shrike held his breath and walked beneath it. The marble shielded him from the iron fence. A shudder ran through him all the same as he went.
Shrike followed his gut feeling down a formerly familiar path towards Temple Bar, where the Knights Templar had once reigned over their own court. The half-timbered inns appeared much the same, though their occupants had changed from knights to clerks. And one clerk in particular, Shrike knew, for when he had locked eyes with Lofthouse at last, he felt the warm rush of victory radiating from the acorn throughout his body.
And perhaps the warm rush of something else besides.
Shrike had no expectations of what might await him in the mortal realm. To find at the end of his quest a mortal man with the enormous, soft, dark eyes of a hunted hart in a shadowed glade—well, that was certainly a surprise, and not an unwelcome one. The eyes alone would have fascinated Shrike. In addition to this, a fine-boned face with nose, chin, and cheekbones honed to a keen edge, and a complexion as speckled as a sparrow’s egg—even over the rosebud pink of the lips—all combined to captivate him. The sweep of chestnut hair low over his brow tempted Shrike to brush it out of his eyes and take that noble chin in hand. If he had but passed this delicate face in severe garb on the street, he would have halted his quest to learn more of the man. Fortunate, then, that the quest itself had forced their paths to cross.
Then those freckled rosebud lips had opened, and the question that emerged had set Shrike back on his heels.
“Your name, sir?”
The interruption of the clerk’s master allowed Shrike to recover from the shock and realize that, like most mortals, the clerk did not actually demand to know his true name—just to know what he was called. Shrike could offer him that much on their first meeting. He would like to offer him much more anon.
At present, however, the clerk had set him on another quest.
The Green Man. A good omen, Shrike thought. An aspect of the Oak King and a symbol of summer’s triumph over winter. He strode away from Staple Inn with renewed purpose. While the paths running through London had increased in population, the signs hanging above the doors of the edifices he passed had retained a great deal of their medieval origins. A scarlet lion over some thresholds, a white hart over many others, and, at length, the green-tinged head of a man with ivy spewing from his eyes, ears, and mouth.
Shrike entered. While the mortal behind the bar looked askance at his attire, he accepted his coin regardless. Shrike settled in to wait for the sharp-featured, sharp-tongued, fierce little bird wrapped in dark garb, and eagerly looked forward to the opportunity to prove himself worthy of his favour.
~
“Bless my soul!” cried Mr Grigsby the instant Wren returned to the office. “Is that your new muse?”
“What?” blurted Wren.
“Forgive me,” Mr Grigsby added in a conspiratorial undertone. It seemed he supposed Wren objected to the volume of his words rather than their content. “I mean only to ask—is he to pose for your next piece? An engraving, perhaps, or dare I hope, a painting? I’m in eagerness to see it, whatever form it may take.”
“No.” Wren hadn’t the heart to tell Mr Grigsby that he’d given up on his artistic aspirations long ago. Still, he could promise something. “If one of my works is to be exhibited, I shall tell you straight off.”
Technically that wasn’t a lie, for, as he had no intention of submitting any of his works to galleries, he need never tell Mr Grigsby anything.
It seemed to gratify the old gentleman, who gave him a warm smile and returned to his ledger humming a few tuneless yet cheerful bars.
Wren returned to his own work feeling far less sanguine. Butcher—if that was the bizarre stranger’s real name, which Wren very much doubted—had set his brain afire. Bad enough if Wren had only glimpsed such a figure in a crowded street or a shadowed alley. To have spoken to him, however, and found his speech and manner as medieval as his garb…
All this aroused Wren’s suspicions as well as his interest.
Checking to make sure Mr Grigsby wasn’t watching him—which he never was, but Wren preferred not to leave matters to chance—he slipped his memorandum-book out of his desk and jotted down a description of the whole encounter in shorthand. Certain details, like smouldering black eyes and high cheekbones, may have taken precedence over others. No matter. Whether or not anything came of their crossing paths in reality, he would make something of it in pencil, ink, or paint.
Then, with the riddle of Butcher set down in black and white, Wren attempted to solve it.
There were few reasons Wren could think of why anyone, much less such a Gothic figure as Butcher, would accost him at his place of work. Money motivated most things, in Wren’s experience. Yet as a clerk taking in not more than forty shillings a week, he had none—at least, not enough to make it worth anyone else’s trouble. Nor did he have any debts which might provoke a moneylender to send out a large and imposing figure to intimidate Wren into paying.
Perhaps Mr Grigsby did have the right notion, in his own way. Perhaps this Butcher was no hired brute, but a hired model. Or, more likely, a hired actor.
The more Wren reflected on this possibility, the more plausible it seemed. While he didn’t have mortal enemies, there remained a certain coterie in the city who might consider him a sort of professional nemesis. Though they didn’t want Wren dead—probably—they would delight to see him humiliated in his office. Furthermore, this certain coterie was the precise sort of people who would hire the queerest possible actor to do the job.
Except Butcher had proved a touch too queer. A great deal of craftsmanship had gone into his costume. Expensive craftsmanship at that, full of little details—all in black and with such fine tooling on the leather mask—that would not read well from the stage. Nothing in it matched any role performed in the city at present; medieval pageantry was not in current dramatic fashion. So it would have to be especially made, and that would cost a great deal more coin than Wren believed a certain coterie had at their disposal. Unless they had found themselves fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of an eccentric aristocrat who already had such a costume to hand mouldering away in some ancestral cedar chest.
Wren had one secret, of course. And while he’d never breathed a word of it to any living soul, save the other individual involved, one person had discovered it quite by accident, and there remained a few others out in the world who might have guessed it. And given this particular secret and those who knew of it, two of the three possibilities remained the same; blackmail, for those who suspected the secret had the habit of spending more money than they earned; or humiliation, as those who suspected the secret found obscure pranks particularly amusing, and would think it a grand lark to hire an actor to tease the secret out of Wren.
Out of the two, Wren thought the second—a humiliating prank—the most plausible. Because, if so, the suspected parties couldn’t have chosen a more promising actor to carry out their plan. Whether they knew it or not, this Butcher, bizarre as he behaved, had precisely the sort of countenance, form, and figure that would most tempt Wren to reveal his secret.
