Page 21 of The Cabinet of Dr. Leng

Constance followed him, slipping her stiletto from its sheath. It was not her plan to kill anyone, but if anything went wrong upstairs and their presence became known, she’d do whatever was necessary to free Joe and get him out of this odious place.

She waited on the steps, senses hyperacute. For a minute, all was silent. Then a faint noise filtered down—a lurching groan, as if someone had just had the wind knocked out of them. Another minute passed, and Constance heard a faint scratching sound—twice.

That was the signal: Murphy had successfully overcome the second keeper and would now be on his way up to the third floor, where the largest cells housed up to twenty-four men each.

It was Constance’s turn. She slipped back down to the first-floor landing and flitted along the passage, her form black on black, effectively invisible.

She crouched beneath the window of the pillbox and glanced at her pocket watch. She had five minutes until Murphy would start opening the cell doors, triggering a stampede.

The problem was, the keeper near her appeared quite comfortable in his miniature guardhouse and showed no signs of wanting to leave. She needed to get him to step out—without causing a premature alarm. She wanted Joe safely out of his cell and down the stairs before the riot commenced.

From her crouching position, she took a deep breath; let it out; then took in another, drawing in as much air as she could manage. She raised the tip of her tongue so it just touched the soft palate of her throat. Then, bringing the wind up from deep within her diaphragm, she lowered her tongue and forced air across the roof of her mouth. A sound very much like the droning of a bee seemed to emanate…from the far side of the keeper’s pillbox.

Remaining crouched in the darkness, Constance did it again. This time, she heard a rasp of a chair being pushed back as the keeper stood up. He’d heard it, too.

Constance’s father had been a poet, a prankster, and a dreamer. One of his more impractical ideas had taken him from London to New York just before the outbreak of the Civil War. He’d never truly been able to find his footing in America, but he never lost his fondness for carnival tricks, picked up as a youth at Lambeth Fair, and he’d delighted his children with exhibitions of ventriloquism before his death from cholera in 1877.

She lowered her chin, contracting her larynx as much as possible, and forced more air from her lungs. This had the effect of lowering the drone from high in the air to someplace near the ground: in the parlance of the carnival trade, exchanging the “sky technique” for the “ground technique.”

The keeper, mystified at the thought of a bee in the workhouse on a chill winter night, unlocked his window and stuck his head out inquiringly. Immediately, a piece of sopping cotton gauze was pressed into his nose and mouth, and seconds later his inert form was propped against the inside wall of his pillbox, Constance rifling his pockets.

There was no key: this was not unexpected, as Moseley had said the keys were normally kept on the basement level, out of harm’s way. Standing, she checked her pocket watch again: three minutes had passed. She could imagine Murphy in much the same position: two flights above, waiting in the darkness of the vestibule, ready to unleash mayhem upon the restless island.

She hurried forward until she stood on the verge of the great hall itself. She could just make out the tiers of cellblocks, could hear the susurrus of night sounds that drifted about the enclosed space.

Sudden footsteps sounded from above. It was Murphy, moving quickly toward the last cell on the third floor, ready to unleash the hounds of hell. Spurred into action, Constance ran to the cell door and inserted one of the two skeleton keys they had made. A murmur of voices was beginning to rise around and above her—sleepy, curious, annoyed. She slid the key into the lock, turned it, pulled the door open. In the dimness, she could see a single figure inside, sitting upright on what appeared to be a filthy pallet, motionless. Motionless, but alert: he, too, had heard her ventriloqual drone. She took a step toward the little figure, all alone, her heart abruptly pounding, the mephitic air so full of tension it was as if she were surrounded by an electrical field paralyzing in its power.

The figure inside jumped to his feet, staring at her and backing up. Above, there was a clang of iron as Murphy opened the farthest cell on the third floor.

In the dim light, she could not make out the boy very clearly. She took a step forward into the cell, and the boy retreated again.

“Joe,” she said. “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m here to take you away from this place.”

The boy didn’t move. Above, a second cell door banged open, and she heard Murphy’s voice cry out: “All out, boyos! Run for it!”

Now, on all three levels, prisoners were waking up, the noise escalating dramatically.

Constance stepped closer. The boy was like a wild animal, tense, ready to fly. Realizing how she must look in her catsuit, she pulled the cap from her head and shook out her hair. As she did, she got a better look at the boy’s face.

“Who did that to you?” she said, pointing at Joe’s bruised and swollen eye.

For a moment, he didn’t answer. Then: “Cook is what done it,” came the voice…

…A voice out of the uttermost limits of her memory.

She stood, paralyzed, a few seconds longer. Then—as the clatter of footsteps echoed down the stairwell and the voices swelled to a roar—she reached out and grasped Joe’s hand. “Come on!” she cried, pulling him toward the basement door ahead of the mob that was gathering behind them.

14

CONSTANCE RACED DOWN THEstone stairway, clutching Joe’s hand. As they reached the bottom landing, she could hear from above the boom of iron and cries of men, along with the thunder of trampling feet. Meanwhile, from down the basement passage, she could also hear a muffled pounding and shouting: the cook, who had been roused and was beating on his locked door. She glanced again at Joe’s face, bruised and ashen in the lamplight, and thought for a brief moment of exacting revenge on the cook. But there was no time for that now. She grasped Joe’s hand tighter and rushed out the door into the night.

At first, Joe had resisted her, pulling back against her headlong charge, but once outside he willingly followed her across the lawn into a stand of laurels, where they stopped and hid, waiting. Moments later, a stream of men burst out of the doorway. Some were stumbling in leg irons, others running free, many shouting at this unexpected deliverance.

A siren began a mournful wailing from the direction of the Octagon. Immediately, the knot of third-floor prisoners cramming through the door grew frantic, inmates pushing each other aside in their hurry to escape.

Constance spied Murphy among the crowd. She rose and beckoned him to their hiding place. He slipped into the laurels, breathing hard.

“That was a sight I’m not likely to forget,” he said, a grin ofexcitement on his face. “All them gobshites streaming from their cells like hornets from a kicked nest—pardon the liberty, ma’am.”

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