Read Online Cannonbridge by Jonathan Barnes - Free Book Online Page B

tight, her figure slim and attractive. There is a certain exoticism to her—there are tattoos beneath the fabric of her dress, inked sigils and signs of the most curious kind—and she possesses a savage sort of beauty, fraying at the edges. All but the most witless observer would surely be able, at the sight of her frantic, half-tripping gait, her drawn face, the look of anguish in her eyes, to discern that here is a lady who has indeed been most imperfectly used.
    She looks behind her once more, this hunted girl, and one would, if one were of a mind to follow the direction of her gaze, discern her pursuers: two men, both stout and perspiring, both dressed in matching suits of bottle green. They might, in other circumstances, seem slightly comical but somehow here, in this place and at this time, they do not. There is something in the set of their jaws, you understand, something in the way in which they carry their bulk, with a lascivious sort of pride, which would make the smile drop at once from the face of even the most committed humorist.
    Towards the end of the street there is a building, tall and wide and made of grey stone, which has many windows and many entrances and exits. The name of the place may be read above the largest of its numerous doors, at which a man in a damson-coloured uniform stands laconic guard and from which an elderly couple can be seen emerging, with brittle uncertainty, into the open air: THE KITTIWAKE HOTEL.
    At the sight of this, the young woman seems to surge forwards. It seems probable that she dare not risk breaking into a run, into anything more, in fact, than the briskest of strides, but she is moving faster now than she has so far today, in all her long and perilous flight through the city.
    Later she will ask herself why she felt so drawn to the Kittiwake, why it seemed to her to represent a refuge, and she will discover that she does not possess a satisfactory answer. Of course, the elements in her which remain superstitious, that still believe in destiny and fate and in the influence of the planets upon the human soul, will wonder whether the intersection between her own life and one of the residents of that celebrated lodge house might not represent a page in her history that had long been written and ordained. Another, perhaps more rational, even cynical, side to her will simply take it to be a rare stroke of good fortune in a life which has hitherto been ruled by malign coincidence.
    At the time, however, she simply does not question the sudden urge to be inside that hotel. The front entrance is not for her, being altogether too public and too grand. The likelihood of being turned away there as an itinerant and waif is high so she skirts adroitly along the left-hand side of the building, down an alleyway along which the illusion that the façade creates—of affluence and discretion—is replaced by the facts of its underpinning: grime, hard work and altogether different classes of person than those who are, at polite intervals, disgorged by the great front door.
    The girl looks behind her, half-hoping, although, in truth, she knows that she cannot, to have shaken off her rotund pursuers. But no. There they are: a pair of bulky shadows at the start of the path.
    She sees ahead of her a well-lit entrance, a glow of warmth and labour, and so she presses on. Reaching the open door, she steps inside, the cold of the autumn evening at her back.
    All at once she is confronted by the furnace industry of a busy kitchen, by flames and smells of cooking and the clatter of plates and cutlery, by two (three? four?) dozen people bent upon the task of satiating the hungers of all those who reside within the Kittiwake and who pay handsomely for that privilege. The room is filled with men but there are women here also—maids and scullery girls—and our heroine, when no-one seems to give her the slightest bit of notice or challenge her or ask her to explain her presence upon the premises, simply