Artful: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

things? Grab the nearest Jew and vent your spleen upon him. It was a grouse miscarriage, is what it was. A grouse miscarriage.”
    Sanguine Harry suddenly pulled up on the reins, and the horse, which needed very little incentive to come to a halt, obliged. Fagin looked up and saw that they had arrived at the medical college, a rather undistinguished brick building with gargoyles leering down at them from the drainpipes overhead.
    “Wait here,” Sanguine Harry ordered him.
    At first, Fagin was inspired to ask why and, for that matter, inquire as to why he could not simply be on his way, but when he opened his mouth to speak and made as if to depart the immediate area, Sanguine Harry glared at him with that evil eye of his, and Fagin kept himself exactly and precisely where he was, murmuring, “No reason not to be keeping peace in the family; no, there isn’t.” So he kept his peace—and while he was at it, kept himself in one piece—while Harry offloaded the coffin and, hoisting it onto one shoulder, strode into the college as if he were delivering a box filled with bread. He was there for several minutes, and when he emerged, it was with a black purse that jingled when he walked. He vaulted to the driver’s seat and once again snapped the reins. Had the horse been a man, he would have groaned audibly upon being made to start walking yet again, but the horse had been given no say in the status or social ranking it had achieved thus far, and so offered no protest, correctly judging that it would serve no purpose.
    “You have to be getting out of London, Fagin.”
    Fagin nodded. “Yes. Yes, taking a short break could—”
    “Not short and not a break neither. You need to get completely out. For the love of all that’s unholy, you old fool,” he continued, running right over Fagin’s attempted protest, “you were dragged out into the street. Dozens of eyes saw you. You were hung. All London knows you were hung. The bloody newspapers wrote of it. If you’re seen as alive, it’s going to raise all manner of questions that no one wants asked, most especially you and me, and even more most especially, your brother.”
    “Then it’s my brother I’ll be approaching to learn his opinion of this wretched notion of exile.”
    “It isn’t a matter of opinion, Fagin. This is what your brother wants of you and for you. You’re toxic to him and to all our kind right now. The citizenry can’t know that dead don’t always mean dead, or it could ignite a witch hunt the likes of which we’ve never seen .”
    “Witch hunt?” scoffed Fagin. “Nonsense, Harry. People are more forward-thinking than that. More enlightened. This is not the Dark Ages. This is the nineteenth century.”
    “And we—all of us—desire to see the twentieth century, and will do nothing and allow no one to endanger that.”
    “I don’t pose any sort of threat.”
    “And if you’d been allowed to be delivered to the college? Lying there on the slab, still sound asleep, the moment they cut into you, you’d have sat up and started shrieking like a banshee. You think such a thing wouldn’t have gotten some small bit of notice , eh? You think they wouldn’t have backtracked every step of the trail you left behind, and where do you think that trail could lead? Ah, you’re silent in response to that, eh? Finally! I thought nothing save ripping the tongue from your withered head would accomplish that. Gods, Fagin, look at you,” he said, shaking his head in disgust. “Why have you let yourself get this way? You’ve near to starved yourself! Let yourself become a withered shell of what you should be!”
    “If my dear brother is concerned over my drawing attention to myself,” said Fagin defensively, “I’d think he’d be appreciative that I’ve been restrained in my appetites.”
    “There’s restraint and then there’s self-deprivation!”
    “Just haven’t been as hungry as I used to be. It’s none of your concern, my dear