CHAPTER 6

THE MISSING UNICORN

Lucy Harker could not keep her eyes still. She sat at the huge wooden table at the warm heart of Sara Falk’s kitchen, her neck craning and swivelling as she tried to take in the extraordinary room that almost ran across the whole basement of the house. The only clear space was the table itself, a big five-sided thing with age-darkened oak legs supporting a top almost white with the repeated scrubbing it had received over the years.

At the centre of the table burned a single candle surrounded by five leafy twigs, all of different woods, laid in a rough star: an oak twig bearing an acorn crossed another bearing the distinctive keys of an ash, which crossed a sprig of white hawthorn resting on a spray of pink apple blossom that supported a hazel stick heavy with green nuts. Beyond this calm half acre of scrubbed wood there was an ordered mayhem of shelves and racks and cupboards, with alcoves and pillars leading into glimpsed side-larders and pantries all crammed with boxes, bookcases and bottle racks.

Wherever the eye looked, it found a bewildering variety of things in which the unfamiliar comfortably outnumbered the familiar: apothecary jars with ancient gilt lettering on them fought for shelf space with irregular ziggurats of spice tins while below them on a groaning dresser bucket-shaped stone crocks sprouted explosions of spoons, spatulas and porridge spirtles like exotic wooden flower arrangements. Lowly potato sacks slumped next to metal-trimmed tea chests which in turn supported a regiment of black japanned canisters emblazoned with yellowing paper squares stamped with impressive red Siamese chop marks that made them look more like battle pennants than labels.

One windowsill was piled so high with jars containing such a multicoloured variety of liquids and preserves that the gas lamp shining in from the street above turned it into a three-dimensional stained-glass window.

Even the ceiling was full; every spare inch was jammed with bunches of drying herbs hanging next to smoked hams and strings of onions, and something that looked suspiciously like a blunderbuss. There were recognisable kitchen tools scattered about–homely, useful things like graters and colanders and rolling pins and very up-to-date mechanical devices like hand-cranked apple-peelers and sausage-stuffers. There were also indeterminate contraptions made of metal, wood or glass which seemed as if they’d be equally at home in an alchemist’s laboratory, a mechanic’s shed or even perhaps a very experimental dungeon.

Knives, hatchets and blades of every shape, size and age (including a notched cutlass and a very hacked-about boarding axe) fanned across one wall next to a similarly bewildering profusion of pots, pans and chafing dishes, all scoured and polished to a high copper sheen which reflected the fire glowing red in the centre of the huge cast-iron range at the heart of the room.

The range was a great contraption of stove-blackened metal and brass-bound hinges, in the centre of which a fire crackled happily behind the bars of an open grate. “The Dreadnought Patent Range” was embossed in blocky lettering across the back of the fireplate, and a kettle the size of a baby hippopotamus hissed and bubbled on the hotplate beneath.

Next to it on a leather-topped club fender sat Cook, dobbing a mixture of sugar, currants and allspice into the centre of six pastry circles laid out on a small table beside her.

Cook had been introduced to Lucy as just Cook, as if no further name was necessary or indeed available.

She definitely looked at least part of the part: she was built on a heroically stocky scale, and the expanse of white pinafore straining across her ample bosom combined with her generous wide-set curves to give her both the cut and jib of a small galleon, one that had been built at a time when the broadest of beams were in fashion. The part of her that didn’t look the part was her face: the wisps of greying and once-blonde hair that escaped from the white cotton mob-cap were ladylike enough, but the black eye patch and the scar that emerged from it to dent her nose and the opposite cheek gave her a wild, buccaneering air. It was an impression entirely supported by the fearless sparkle in her one blue eye, and perhaps explained to the curious and associative mind how a blunderbuss and a boarding axe had become part of her eccentric batterie de cuisine.

Despite her size, Cook seemed to have something of Mr Sharp’s ability to move fast because Lucy thought she had only glanced up for a moment to examine a duck carcase which appeared to have been run over by a lawn roller before being hung from the roof to dry, but when she dropped her eyes she saw Cook had placed six pastry lumps on a baking tray in front of her. They were the shape (and almost the size) of cannonballs and had been rolled in sugar.

Lucy looked at them, then at Sara Falk who was sitting on the other side of the table with a bowl of hot water, some flannels, a towel and a box full of old gloves.

“Now, my lovely, these are Eccles cakes,” said Cook. Her voice was rough but kind. “We shall bake them for twenty minutes or so, and while we wait for them to come out of the Dreadnought, I will try my best to free your mouth without any distress. I expect the smell of them baking will encourage you to bear any small pain we may accidentally inflict, knowing once we’re done you can enjoy eating them, all of them if you wish, perhaps with a nice slice of Lancashire cheese. I assure you they will be worth it: I have used the estimable Mr Henderson’s receipt.”

She offered Sara a small knife.

“No,” said Sara. “Lucy may do it, for the luck of the thing.”

Cook expertly spun the blade between her fingers so the handle faced towards Lucy.

“Three slashes across the top of each one, no more, no less,” said Sara Falk, giving Lucy an encouraging and mysterious wink. “Threes are powerful things, Lucy, almost as powerful as fives: some say the triple cut is for Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem, some say it’s for the Trinity. Others say it’s for the Maid, the Mother and the Crone. Wise King Solomon said—”

Cook made a short explosive snort like a boiler blowing a safety valve.

“If Wise King Solomon knew anything about baking, he’d have known it’s to let the steam out and stop them exploding sticky mincemeat all over the inside of my nice clean oven.”

She jabbed the knife handle at Lucy.

“Come on, girl, let’s get this done. My tummy’s rumbling.”

“Your tummy’s always rumbling,” said Sara Falk with a smile. “It’s like living with a permanent thunderstorm.”

“Why—” said Cook, and then cut off abruptly as Lucy snatched the knife from her fingers.

“No!” said Sara, reaching across the table, too late to stop the girl.

Lucy stretched her jaw as far away from her nose as she could manage, like a silent scream, then sliced the tip of the knife into the hessian plaster, the sharp edge of the blade facing away from her, and ripped outwards, wincing as she did so.

“Aie!” She said, her voice escaping through the ragged hole she had cut. She stabbed the knife into the wood tabletop where it quivered with the force of her blow as she reached inside her mouth. Her finger came out with a smear of blood on the tip. “Merde. Je me suis coupée. Ce salaud—”

Cook blew her cheeks out in shock.

“Hell’s teeth!” she exploded. “She’s a bloody Frenchy!”

Lucy worked her mouth, trying to spit something out through the hole in the gag.

“Lucy,” said Sara, reaching across the table with the flannel while Cook surreptitiously reclaimed her knife and examined the tip for signs of damage. “Do you speak English? Parlez vous—?”

The girl managed to spit the thing out of her mouth. It bounced on the scrubbed deal table and came to a halt between them. It was a gold ring and even though it landed face down, they could see from the back that the stone it was set with was broken and half was missing.

Lucy tugged at the hole in her pitch-plaster gag, wincing again and grimacing as she made it bigger. She took several deep breaths and looked at them as if what she had done and the thing she had produced as if by magic from her mouth was perfectly normal.

“C’est l’anneau de ma mère,” she said with a shrug. “Ils ont lui cherché partout, ces salauds avec leurs visages bleus—”

She reached for the ring and wiped her spit from it on the flannel.

“—je pensais que j’allais avaler le truc foutu!”

“What did she say?” said Cook. “She speaks so fast—”

“She said it was her mother’s ring. And they searched everywhere for it, those blue-faced, um, bastards. And she thought she was going to swallow the, er, damned thing.” Sara raised an eyebrow at Cook. “I must say she swears quite a lot.”

“Spirited and clever though, hiding it in her mouth,” said Cook with a gleam of approval in her eye.

“And reckless,” said Sara Falk. “She could have choked.”

“Well, she is a Glint,” said Cook. “Just like you. And you were reckless at her age…”

“But if she can only speak French…” said Sara Falk, ignoring the raised eyebrow that accompanied Cook’s observation, “why is she called Lucy Harker?”

Lucy stretched across the table, indicating she wanted Sara Falk’s right hand. She let the girl take her glove and turn it to look at the ring she wore outside the glove.

“Lucy,” said Sara Falk, “what—?”

Lucy turned her mother’s ring over and held it next to the other one. The former’s gold setting was an older and thinner style, but the stone, of which half remained in the setting, was also a bloodstone.

And more than that, it was a lion.

Exactly the same lion as the one on Sara Falk’s ring. The only thing it lacked was the half of the stone that had cracked and fallen out.

All that was missing was the unicorn.

“Sara,” said Cook very slowly, stretching her hand forward and showing another matching bloodstone ring on her flour-covered finger. “Her mother was one of us.”

They stared at the girl. She looked at them, then at the rings, then back at Sara.

“Mais…” Lucy said, hope and distrust fighting for control over the smooth planes of her face. “Qui êtes-vous?”