Lies Sleeping

3 More Pepper

‘Maybe she went back for her phone,’ said Bev. ‘I’ll bet you didn’t think of that.’

‘We didn’t find a phone,’ I said, although it was true I hadn’t thought of that.

We were in Bev’s outsized kitchen cooking pasta and random things we’d found in the fridge. I was frying onions and garlic in the bottom of a saucepan while Bev defrosted the mince by dragging it out of the freezer and glaring at it until it melted. She’s done this before and it takes under a minute. My current working hypothesis is that she’s scaring the water molecules into a state of excitation. I’m dying to wire up the mince and get some precise measurements, but Bev won’t let me. She says it’s because a goddess should retain a few mysteries, but I think she’s saving it for a future PhD project. I did try to further the cause of science once by grabbing her around the waist and kissing her neck in the hope it would cause the mince to burst into flames. Sadly, this did not happen – although she did smell nice and, anyway, in science a negative result is almost as good as a positive. And however arduous kissing Beverley becomes, I am willing to persevere in the name of progress.

There was a shriek from the back garden, where Abigail and Nicky were doing something youthful and thankfully unspecified down on the riverbank. Beverley had taken both of them down to Runnymede earlier to hunt insects as part of our ongoing project to keep Abigail out of trouble during the summer holidays.

Once the mince was steaming gently Beverley broke it up with a wooden spatula and dropped it into the saucepan, where I stirred it as it browned.

‘I wish we knew what the Pale Nanny was,’ I said.

‘You can’t call her the Pale Nanny,’ said Beverley, who was hunting through her cupboard for anything vaguely tomato-ish. ‘The Pale Lady is a very specific person upstream and using her name casually like that is a mistake.’

Mistake has a specific meaning when Beverley says it like that. It means likely to provoke outrage and adverse consequences, and I don’t mean on social media either.

‘Ash called the one in Soho a “Pale Lady”,’ I said. Mind you, the woman in question had just thrust a metre of iron railing through his abdomen so he wasn’t what you’d call a reliable witness.

Beverley found a tin of peeled plum tomatoes hidden behind a couple of jumbo tins of boiled chickpeas that I doubted anyone in this house was ever going to be hungry enough to cook.

‘Wasn’t she some kind of chimera?’ she asked, as she rattled through a drawer for the clean tin opener. ‘Isn’t that what Abdul called her?’

Dr Abdul Haqq Walid was the Folly’s very own part time cryptopathologist and weird specimen collector. We’d recently ponied up to get him a qualified assistant and she, one Dr Jennifer Vaughan, had spent the last year reclassifying everything.

‘Jennifer says “chimera” is not necessarily a helpful term,’ I said. ‘I think she’s right. I think the Soho Lady and the Pale Nanny were High Fae.’

Beverley snorted. It didn’t help that her and everybody else in the demi-monde couldn’t agree on terminology, either.

The mince was browning nicely so I turned down the heat to stop it from burning and Bev tipped in the tomatoes and went looking for some peppers.

The good gentlemen of the Society of the Wise had plenty of theories and systems of classification for the people of the demi-monde, most of them involving a mixture of Latin, Greek and misinterpreted Darwinism. To them, fae basically meant anyone who was vaguely magical who hadn’t gone to the right school, with the High Fae being the creatures referenced in medieval literature who dwelt in their own castles with a proper feudal set-up and an inexplicable need to marry virtuous Christian knights.

I’d been pretty certain it was all folklore, until one hot summer when I nearly got myself whisked off to fairyland – which looked suspiciously like a parallel dimension, or whatever the cosmologists are calling them these days. Bev rescued me, by the way, which is why I never argue about emptying the dishwasher.

The best general description I ever heard came from Zachary Palmer, self-styled half-fairy, who once told me that there were three basic types of people. Those who were born magical, which included most of the fae; those who acquired magic through their own agency – like me, Nightingale, all the other practitioners, and presumably aspiring legendary swordswomen like Guleed . . .

And the final group were those who had been changed by magic, often against their will. I had documented cases of children who’d brushed up against fairyland and come back with different coloured eyes and magical abilities. Then there were those who had been altered by evil practitioners into monstrous chimera, real cat-girls and tiger-boys. Like I said, I wasn’t joking about the crimes against humanity.

And there was at least one person whose mind and body had been possessed by a revenant spirit, or possibly the ghost of a god, and that had left her ‘changed’. But I’ve got to believe that biology isn’t destiny, and we’re more than just the puppets of our endocrine system – or else what’s the fucking point?

Beverley smelt the sauce and wrinkled her nose.

‘Are you sure you don’t have any tomato puree at all?’ I asked.

But there wasn’t any, so we fell back on the time-honoured approach of throwing in peppers until it tasted like something my mum would cook.

We laid the kitchen table and called in the girls.

‘Wash your hands before you come in,’ yelled Beverley as Nicky and Abigail ran up.

Abigail was fifteen, short and skinny, and making a spirited attempt to make the puffball Afro if not fashionable again, then at least unavoidable. She was also, in a semi-official official way, my fellow apprentice – having taken a hastily rewritten oath in the presence of, and with the written consent of, her parents. Both of who were holding me personally responsible for her safety, which was totally fair and completely uncomfortable.

I watched as she stopped just short of the back door and held out her hands to Nicky.

Who being goddess of the River Neckinger, albeit nine years old, conjured a wobbly globe of water as big as my head in which both girls washed their hands. Then, with a flick of her fingers, the globe evaporated leaving their hands clean and dry.

Abigail caught me watching and winked.

The science teachers at school had noticed Abigail’s interest in Latin and history and, fearing the loss of a star pupil to the arts, had started tempting her with the prospect of after-school classes. The consensus was that, when the time came, she was going to have her pick of unis from Oxford to Edinburgh, and Manchester to Imperial.

Personally, I thought she should stay in London where I could keep an eye on her.

‘You’re worried about her going to Edinburgh?’ Beverley had said. ‘You’d better start worrying about her going to Massachusetts.’

But did Massachusetts have as many ghosts as London, I wondered as, over dinner, Abigail asked about the latest spate of ghost sightings. She was convinced there’d been an increase in activity despite a lack of empirical evidence.

‘What about Brent’s horses?’ asked Bev.

‘I couldn’t find a trace of anything,’ I said.

Brent was another of Bev’s sisters – her river ran through West London – although since she was only nine years old she mostly lived with her mum or her sister Fleet. I’ve tried asking Beverley how this growing up almost like a normal person thing works but she doesn’t appear to understand the question.

Anyway Brent had complained that there were horses in her river in the spring and, finding nothing myself, I stuck Abigail on the problem. She found nothing, apart from discovering that a minor battle from the English Civil War had taken place along the A315 from where it crossed the Brent to about where the Premier Inn is – at the end of which the Parliamentarians ran for it and the Royalists looted the then small town of Brentford. Thus revealing their general intentions as to London proper which, in the words of one historian, significantly contributed to Londoners’ determination to defend the Capital.

The Royalist cavalry had been heavily engaged and we did dig up some ghostly horsemen reports from the eighteenth century, but whatever had spooked Brent hadn’t stayed for me or Abigail.

After supper it was my job to drive Abigail back home to Kentish Town. I considered driving all the way back again to spend the night with Bev, but I needed to make an early start the next morning.

Still, there was a bit of sly snogging on Beverley’s doorstep as I left, with Nicky giggling and Abigail harrumphing in the background.

‘You’ve got a big stupid smile on your face,’ said Abigail when we got in the car.

‘That’s because I’m in love,’ I said – which had the double virtue of being both true and shutting her up for the whole drive home.