its relentless detail. It was a revelation: not beautiful in a restrained, classical way, but fierce and extravagantly Gothic. The intricacy of the design was hypnotic, overwhelmingly so, and the arrogance and tradition it represented made itself felt in the pit of her stomach.
She passed the length of the Palace in a daze, and on looping back up towards St Stephen’s Tower, had to stop to remind herself of who she wasn’t. She touched the back of her neck self-consciously. Although she looked the part of a twelve-year-old boy, she still didn’t quite feel it. Last night’s coaching session with Felicity – a pint and a cold meat pie eaten out of hand in a public house – had been of some use. But it had also intensified her awareness of the very different world of men. Years in an all-girl’s school had changed her. And now, behind the site fencing there would be swarms of men and boys, roaring and swearing and doing whatever it was builders did while preparing to work, and they would all scrutinize her and know immediately if something was amiss. Of course, it was much too late to turn back. Mary took a deep breath, wiped her damp palms on her trousers, and marched through the narrow entrance gate into the building site proper.
She was braced for a wall of noise, an audience of raucous, suspicious masculinity. Yet if anything, the building site was quieter than the street. Small clusters of men chatted as they unpacked tools, or swallowed the last bits of breakfast, or inspected the incomplete work. None looked up as she passed.
There didn’t appear to be much order to the site – not to an outsider, at least. A small shed to her right seemed to function as an office; at least, it contained a desk covered with several inches of papers, but no person. No one appeared to challenge her presence, so she walked about the site slowly, simply looking.
She’d imagined a building site to be like a cross between a factory and an anthill: scores of people milling about, busily doing nothing, until a giant bell rang calling them to work, at which point they would all fall into line. Yet what she saw seemed more leisurely and self-directed. Already a pair of bricklayers had begun to mix up some mortar, and other tradesmen seemed to be finding their places for the day. None took any notice of her, and she suspected that it wasn’t due to the excellence of her masculine costume.
On the south side of the building site, a cluster of perhaps half a dozen men and boys loitered purposefully in the shadow of the Palace. As she drew nearer, Mary realized they were all hovering around one man. He was perhaps in his late forties, with the usual beard and moustache and well-fed paunch. He was also the only man on site wearing a collar and tie, which meant the chances were good that he was the site engineer, Mr Harkness. The fact that he looked tired and harassed rather confirmed this.
“I understand,” he was saying, “that you’re short-handed at the moment. I shall try to find a man to assist you this week, but it is your responsibility to engage a new member for your gang.”
The workman he addressed – a tall, powerfully built man in his middle thirties – glowered with frustration. “Don’t I know it! But it takes time, that. We’re missing an experienced bricklayer, not some useless apprentice.”
A muscle jumped under Harkness’s left eye. “I know,” he said in a placating tone. “As I said, I shall do my best.”
The foreman pushed his way out of the crowd, his face dark with anger. “‘I shall do my best,’” he simpered, imitating Harkness’s tones. “Bloody useless son of a—” His eyes met Mary’s and flared with temper. “What the hell you staring at, boy?”
She quickly averted her eyes and edged deeper into the pack. So that man had been Wick’s workmate. She wondered if they’d been friends.
It took a long time for Harkness to give each labourer his directions. When Mary finally presented herself, he stared at her for a long moment with red-rimmed eyes. “Who?”
Had she not spoken clearly enough? “Mark Quinn, sir. I’m to begin today as an errand boy, if you please.”
The twitch came again, and he pressed a weary hand to his disobedient eye. “As a general errand boy?”
Mary tried to look confident. “Yes, sir.” What could have gone