Page 112 of Never a Hero

‘Would anyone be willing to talk to us?’ Joan asked him. At the same time, she thought: Astrid. She wished she could speak to Astrid again—Astrid had known this was coming. But Astrid had been very clear: When it starts, don’t come and find me. I already fought this fight.

‘My father will,’ Jamie said, surprising her. ‘He’s in residence in this time.’

‘Ying?’ Joan said. She’d met Ying last time. He’d helped her, but not for free. She still owed the Lius a favour because of it.

‘You know my father?’ Jamie said, sounding surprised too. ‘He helped me once,’ Joan said, and Jamie tilted his head in curiosity. Would Ying have a way to get a message to the Court, she wondered suddenly. He was a head of family. He’d have access to official channels. Maybe he’d know who in the Court could be trusted against Eleanor.

‘The main Liu house is on Narrow Street,’ Jamie said. ‘Heart of Chinatown.’

A breeze ran over the canal, cool through the fine mesh of Joan’s skirt. She looked down at what she was wearing. ‘I’d better find some nineteenth-century clothes,’ she said.

thirty-one

Joan walked out into 1891 in a pale blue skirt and a white shirt with sleeves so voluminous that she could easily have tucked Frankie inside them. Ruth had reluctantly changed out of the catsuit into a tailored dress and a tweed jacket. Aaron was in a beige suit with a waistcoat that cinched in tight at the waist, highlighting his lean silhouette.

Jamie had donned a braided wig and black hat that made him look like the Chinese sailors Joan had seen that morning. He scratched under the hat. ‘The wig itches,’ he confided to Joan.

Now that the sun had risen, Joan had a better grasp of their surroundings. The boathouse was on a muddy street lined with buildings on both sides. The end of the road disappeared around a curve, but this stretch had a Chinese medicine shop; a shop that said coffee house, but oddly seemed to be serving steak puddings and mutton chops; and a dingy pawnshop, its soot-blackened window showing second hand shirts and coats. The street seemed rougher than it had in the early morning. Two men scuffled outside the pawnshop, ignored by the sailors and dock workers walking past.

Ruth’s eyes landed on everyone with suspicion. Before they’d left, all the experienced time travellers had automatically removed rings and watches and monster chops, secreting them into hidden pockets inside their clothes. Joan and Nick had followed suit.

‘Pickpockets everywhere in this era,’ Ruth had explained to Joan. ‘With far quicker fingers than mine.’

Joan knew she should have been watching for thieves like Ruth was, but she was mesmerised by everything around her. Nick too had dropped his guard and was staring at their surroundings in fascination.

The fish and eel sellers from earlier had been replaced with louder, more showy costermongers than the pre-dawn crowd: women in ostrich-feathered hats and bright shawls, men with silk kerchiefs tied around their necks. They stood on opposite sides of the road, their calls competing with each other and with the distant hiss and roar of steam trains.

‘Peas pudding hot! Peas pudding hot, hot, hot!’ a man shouted. A short line of sailors waited patiently for him to scoop yellow mash from a pot onto cabbage-leaf cups.

‘Sweet oysters!’ a woman shouted at the same time. ‘Sweet, sweet oysters!’

All the way up the street, trails of discarded cabbage and shells showed the paths of their customers. Frankie was in bliss. She sniffed at the mud with interest, at a putrid oyster, an eel tail.

Ahead, quick movement drew Joan’s eyes. A little girl ran down the street, neatly dodging the scuffling men outside the pawnshop. She bent to scoop up something from the gutter, tucked it into her smeared apron, and ran on.

‘What’s she doing?’ Joan said curiously, watching the girl bend to pick something up again.

‘You really don’t want to know,’ Aaron said. He had his hands in his pockets, and his mouth was a downturned grimace of disgust. ‘What I wouldn’t give for tea at the Savoy,’ he said, almost to himself.

This wasn’t Aaron’s kind of place—there was rubbish everywhere. Fish scrapings rotted in the gutters; horse manure gathered flies. Joan lifted her skirt so that it wouldn’t trail in something rotting and black. And it didn’t smell good, but Joan didn’t mind that. She wanted to try all the food from the carts; she wanted to wander down to the docks.

Nick caught Joan’s gaze, and the wonder in his expression vanished, leaving him guarded again. Joan’s heart felt like lead suddenly. Over the last few months, she’d become used to the punched-gut yearning of seeing him from afar, knowing she’d lost him. But this new divide was so much worse.

‘People are staring,’ Ruth murmured.

Joan looked around. Ruth was right. Everyone from the costermongers to sailors to children.

‘We should have coordinated our clothes,’ Aaron hissed.

‘You’re the one who doesn’t match! Dressed like a lord in Limehouse,’ Ruth muttered to him.

‘I look good!’ Aaron snapped. ‘You should all have matched to me!’

‘Come on,’ Jamie said. ‘Let’s keep moving.’

Joan had thought the buildings around the boathouse were in disrepair, but farther in, the streets grew cramped and dark, and there were more broken windows than intact ones. Dark smoke drifted from chimneys and hung in the air like black mist. Joan was reminded, uncomfortably, of the dilapidated buildings of Eleanor’s world.

They reached a back-alley pub as a group of grey-clothed workers tumbled out. Joan felt pinprick stares on the back of her neck as she passed them.

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