Darren Craske - The Eleventh Plague

The Cruel Mistress

SEVERAL HOURS LATER, once night had fallen, the Silver Swan set sail, leaving the ragged white cliffs of Dover far behind her. The steamship rode effortlessly across the English Channel, the waves parting for her bows' blade.

In his single-berth cabin, Cornelius Quaint made a final sweep with his cut-throat razor. He examined his face in the mirror as if it were something borrowed from a complete stranger. It had the usual wear and tear for a man in his mid-fifties, but it did not look too bad. His rugged face was decorated with furrowed wrinkles around his mouth and nose; crow's feet spread like forked lightning from the corners of his black eyes, and his wavy, silver-white hair swept back from his forehead culminating in a nest of entwined curls at the nape of his neck. It was seemingly immune to any oil or creamed hair product, and Quaint had long since given up trying to tame it.

He dressed for dinner in a black, long-tailed jacket cropped tight to his waist, matching trousers, and a broad-knotted bow tie at his neck. Perhaps a good meal would remove the ache inside him, he thought. He heard the reverberations of song floating through the wall from the cabin next door and smiled, reminding himself that he was not alone.

Madame Destine struggled with a hairbrush through her long silver-white hair, her thoughts just as entangled as her tresses. Although it was not evident from her outer appearance, inside her head and inside her heart she was in mourning.

Before the elixir had touched her lips, she was in command of a startling array of extrasensory abilities, and chief among them was her clairvoyance. As a sideshow fortune-teller, Destine was gifted with the power to foresee certain events in the future. But as much as the wondrous elixir had given her, it had taken away so much more. She had come to rely upon her clairvoyance but now it had deserted her, purged from her system virtually overnight. Even with Cornelius by her side, Madame Destine felt strangely alone. She had emerged from the cocoon as a butterfly, only to lament the life of a caterpillar.

On the night that the antidote worked its magic, Destine's mind was bombarded with a barrage of mysterious prophecies, as though her gifts were eager to impart as much information as they could before abandoning her. Destine's gift had never been entirely reliable, but the lines of communication to the future were degraded, muffled somehow, and they swamped her with mismatched images and disjointed words. But as she had told Ruby Marstrand the night before they sailed, there was one residual vision that remained stubbornly present when all others faded away: 'The past and the present shall entwine once more. Beware the dawn of the Eleventh Plague.'

As far as she could gauge, 'the Eleventh Plague' surely referred to the dreaded poison that she and Cornelius were duty bound to destroy, yet how it entwined with the past was a mystery, one of many swimming around her head. Her premonitions were often irritatingly mystifying, yet there was no misinterpreting the foreboding that chilled her blood.

Formerly Cornelius Quaint's governess, he had fondly nicknamed her his 'compass'. He relied on her to decipher the indecipherable. But he was not one for prophecies and riddles. He believed in the here and now, his feet fixed firmly in the present where he could see things, touch things – hit things. But in truth she was more akin to his conscience, seemingly the only person that he ever listened to (when it suited him, of course). Destine had resigned herself to a life by his side, for ever his guard, and despite having cause to regret her decision on more than one occasion (usually when the man's bullish bombast got him in trouble with authority in one form or another) she knew that her life would have been emptier without him.

'It's gone eight, Madame, are you done?' called the subject of Destine's thoughts from the corridor outside her cabin. 'We'll have to hurry if we want to make dinner before the galley closes.'

'Ayez de la patience, Cornelius,' Madame Destine replied, as she straightened the high collar of her long gown, smoothed down the billowing bustle at her rear and took as deep a breath as she could within the whalebone restraints of her corset. Trying to ignore the impatient tapping of Quaint's foot, she hurriedly arranged her hair into a loose bun at the back of her head, adding a string of pearls around her neck on the outside of her collar.

'Madame, please,' moaned Quaint, 'my stomach thinks my throat's been slit.'

'Do not tempt me!' Destine crackled back. 'Do you not realise that a true lady must shine like a lamp at all times?'

'Even if it attracts the moths?' asked Quaint.

Madame Destine's brow slowly cleared into understanding. 'You are referring to the German that we met in the terminal earlier. You cannot avoid bumping into him at some point, you know. There are only so many places that you can hide on a ship this size. I am ready now, are you happy?' She snatched open her cabin door and stepped into the corridor like an actress making her entrance onstage.

'You look divine,' complimented Quaint, stepping back to admire her. 'I honestly don't know why you spend so much time worrying, Madame. You'd still manage to look radiant were you to dress in nothing but a potato sack.'

'Your flattery is most welcome,' nodded Destine.

'And well deserved,' said Quaint. 'Is that a new dress for the journey I spy?'

'It is an old dress, my sweet…but perhaps a new me,' Madame Destine answered, as they began a brisk stroll towards the dining saloon.

After a few minutes, a comfortable hush had nestled itself between the conjuror and the fortune-teller as they walked along the carpeted corridors. Madame Destine teased her lips with the tip of her tongue. Even though her clairvoyance had deserted her, she was still in possession of her mysterious sensitivity to the feelings of those around her. At that moment she could read Quaint's emotions more easily than words on a page.

'There is something bothering you, Cornelius.' Destine always had a knack of phrasing each question as a statement of fact. Quaint found this a most frustrating habit – especially on this day, and especially as she was correct.

'It's that obvious?' Quaint asked.

'Your eyes always did betray you, even when you were a child. That is why you are a poor gambler,' replied Destine.

'Madame, I take offence!' Quaint snapped in retort, stopping dead in his tracks, forcing Destine to do the same. 'Did I not win the circus from those Prussians in that game of cards all those years ago? Surely that proves that I'm an exceptional gambler!'

'Cornelius, you are a conjuror! You have been making a deck of cards dance to your every whim since you were eight years old. Just because you are a master at outwitting people with your repertoire of card tricks, it does not make you an exceptional gambler – just an exceptional con artist that has never been caught.'

'Yes,' said Quaint, soberly. 'But I do wish you wouldn't use the term "tricks", Destine. You know how that frustrates me. It makes it sound as if any old Tom, Dick or Harry can do it. Stagecraft is within a showman's blood. It's an art form that takes years to perfect, not something that can be stumbled upon by chance!'

'I concede, Cornelius, you are an excellent conjuror. Your eyes are swifter than a falcon's, your hands blur with their speed, and your talent for misdirection is second-to-none – such as you are displaying right now, might I add,' Destine said. 'Enough diversions – are you going to tell me what is bothering you?'

Quaint sighed, relenting to the Frenchwoman's assault.

'I'm just thinking about what I've got myself into…and what I've got you into. The truth is…I can't stop thinking about it. It's plaguing my every thought. Everything is so complicated now compared to the old days whenever I would go on one of these capers. When I inherited the circus troupe all those years ago, I didn't expect them to become-'