Joffie's Mark: Strange Gods, #1

By Mark Peckett

Joffie is fifteen, an orphan and thief, surviving in Victorian Beormingham on her wits and her peculiar talent - the ability to find secret doorways between worlds. Trouble looms when she steals a mysterious cane from a toff and her ensuing adventures place her in mortal danger. Unless she can free a long-forgotten god she and her friends are doomed...

• Language: English
• Publisher: APS Publications
• Release date: Apr 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201341572

Book preview

For Jovie,

when she’s old enough to read it!

Although Joffie’s world of Beormingham, Sulis and Litchfield is made up, if you go to Birmingham, Bath and Lichfield and look hard enough, you can visit some of the places that Joffie visited as well.

MP

The STRANGE GODS Trilogy

Volume 1

PART ONE: BEORMINGHAM

CHAPTER ONE The Tea Leaf

CHAPTER TWO A Cant of Togs

CHAPTER THREE The Kidsman

CHAPTER FOUR A Prince of the City

CHAPTER FIVE The Temple of the Khimaira

CHAPTER SIX The Climbing Boy

CHAPTER SEVEN History

CHAPTER EIGHT Agora

CHAPTER NINE The Heirophant

CHAPTER TEN The Road to Sulis

PART TWO: SULIS

CHAPTER ELEVEN Eshu in Sulis

CHAPTER TWELVE Amid the Alien Corn

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Midnight at the Baths

CHAPTER FOURTEEN Of Gods and Men

CHAPTER FIFTEEN A Pride of Lions

CHAPTER SIXTEEN The Deserving Poor

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Walks Between Worlds

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Burntwood Park

CHAPTER NINETEEN The Folly

CHAPTER TWENTY The Broken Man

PART THREE: LITCHFIELD

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Witch Wood

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO The Hanging Stones

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE The People of Rom

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR The Pool of Bast

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Eyes in the Night

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Zebus The Vizier

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN The Pie Powder Market

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT Trinity House

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE The Tomb of the Troys

CHAPTER THIRTY The Boy in the Water

PART ONE:

BEORMINGHAM

CHAPTER ONE

The Tea Leaf

JOFFIE was the best cutpurse in all of Beormingham. She wasn’t the cleverest or the fastest, but she knew all the secret ways of the old town. She could lift a wallet or dip a lace hanky and be away on her heels to another place that wasn’t really there before the fine gentleman or lady knew their pocket had been picked.

That’s what she called them, The Other Places.

Ever since she was little she had been able to see doors that no one else could see and when she was big enough to reach the handles she had opened them. They took her to dark and gloomy caves, high mountains where the air was thin and clear and deep, dank valleys where the sun never shone, ancient forests and burning deserts, bleak and barren moors and even coral islands in seas the colour of periwinkle. It was strange, she thought, in all the places she had been to she had never seen another living soul. Not a man, woman or child. Not a bird or beast, not a fish or even an insect crawling on the ground.

At first, she didn’t go further than the orphanage where she had lived for most of her life. She had never known her father and the parish priest had brought her here at the age of four when her mother was buried in a pauper’s grave in Saint Barnabus’ churchyard and she couldn’t even say her own name – she had been christened Josephine, but she kept saying Jophesine which somewhere along the line got shortened to Joffie.  Now she couldn’t even remember what her mother looked like. The only life she knew was learning the Holy Scriptures and domestic duties – sewing and baking and washing and mangling.

For excitement she slipped through her secret doors into strange other worlds that lead to different rooms in the orphanage - to the kitchen to thieve cheese and cake for midnight feasts in the dormitory with the other half-starved orphans or Matron’s for pills and syrups when they were feverish, but later, when she ran away, she dodged all over Beormingham, learning to steal for herself and profit.

On this particular day, she had snagged a fat billfold, a gold-plated pocket watch and a lady’s reticule. She should have eaten the comfits from the reticule and thrown it in the cut, pocketed the money, pawned the wallet and fenced the pocket watch with Old Joe, but it had been such a lucky day that she decided to take one more chance.

She slipped through a door sagging on its hinges between the brewhus and the miskins in court of some back-to-backs in Digbeth as Saint Martin in the Bull Ring started to ring the midday and found herself on a path along a clifftop. High above her in a brilliant blue sky white clouds like puffs of lint drifted by. Far below a sea of emerald and diamonds boomed and crashed on jagged rocks.

She thought of Saint Paul’s Square in the Jewellery Quarter and it was almost as if her feet knew which way to go. Very soon after she had first discovered the Other Places she found that was there something inside her which told her which way to go, almost as if the paths were lit by new-fangled gaslights like the ones in Corporation Street.

After she had been walking for about an hour, she came to a door in a crevice in the cliff face. She squeezed through and popped out behind a headstone in Saint Paul’s Square as the church clock finished striking twelve. She had been gone barely a minute. Although the square was thronged with ladies in crinolines with parasols and men in frock coats and stovepipe hats no one noticed just another urchin skulking in the graveyard, her cap pulled tight on her head to hide her watchful eyes and long blonde hair – in her Beormingham it was safer to be thought a boy than a girl.

Joffie looked round for a good mark. Near the church’s narrow doors a group of young dandies in sharp three-piece suits were making a lot of noise. They had splendid curled moustaches and pointed beards and older men leaving the church frowned at them.

She could see gold glittering on their pocket watch chains and their cufflinks and diamonds winking on the tiepins in their Ascot ties. Cufflinks and tiepins were hard to lift and their double Albert watch chains were threaded through the buttonholes of their waistcoats, but men wearing gold and diamonds had wallets full of money that could easily be slipped out of a pocket.

Joffie edged closer. One of the men was more finely dressed than his fellows – from the crown of his shiny top hat to the soles of his shiny pointed shoes he wore gold and diamonds everywhere you could wear them – his buttons, his cufflinks, his tie pin, his watch and chain, the rings on his fingers and the handle of his Malacca wood cane. He positively reeked of money. There was her mark all right.

But behind him lurked a man, dark as the Malacca cane, tricked out in a tweed three-piece suit and a bowler and beneath the rim of his hat his eyes scanned the crowd like the muzzle of an Enfield rifle. Under that dark gaze there was no chance of lifting a wallet ... but the cane with its ivory and gold handle was held so carelessly in a kid-gloved hand.

Joffie took her chance, sidled up to the dandy and tugged at his sleeve.

’Scuse me, mister. Can you spare a tanner?

The face that turned to her was full of contempt. His easy laugh died in his throat, his lip curled and his eyes turned as cold as the diamond in his tie pin.

Get away from me, you ... you ... He sounded disgusted, as if he had looked down and found a dog cocking its leg on his shoes. He tried to jerk his arm away, but Joffie held on.

Go on, mister – just a penny. A farthing.

He raised his cane over his head and swung it at her. It lashed down, but at the very last instant she ducked under his arm and it missed her by inches. As it whistled past her, she grabbed at it, snatched it from his grasp and was off like a shot.

Clutching the cane to her chest, for a moment all she could hear was the pounding of her feet and her heart, her breath and the laugh that burst from her mouth.

The crowds parted before her, a ragged urchin in clothes patched and too big and hobnail boots ringing and sparking on the cobbles, the women shrieking and the men shielding the women.

Then from behind her she heard them raising the beef. First the outraged cry of the man she had robbed: Hi! Hi there! Stop that boy! Stop thief! followed by his fellows like jackdaws mobbing a sparrowhawk.

Stop him!

Stop that boy!

Stop thief!

She dodged under a grabbing hand, jumped over a tripping foot and flew down Ludgate Hill, jumped the wall onto the cinders of the canal towpath and ran towards Gas Street Basin. She danced across one of the Farm Bridge Locks and vanished into the heart of the city.

Later she sat beneath the gallery in the dark pews of Saint Philip’s Church and examined her prize. It was an ordinary clouded cane with a brass ferrule and a gold collar, but the handle! It was made of polished ivory carved into the head of a snarling lion. The lips curled back from fangs that looked as if they would like nothing better than to sink into your hand. The whiskers bristled angrily, the ears lay flat on its skull and the mane curled back onto the handle. And the yellow glass eyes that glared out from under heavy brows – there was something about them. It was almost as if they were watching her – following her as she moved the cane about, full of hatred. It was old, the surface polished smooth and to the colour of cream by many years of use, the carving darkened by the sweat of many hands.

This is worth pounds, thought Joffie. If I sell this I can ... I can ... There was so much she wanted to do, she didn’t know where to start. She wanted a room with a bed and a fire, a slap-up meal at the Grand Hotel, a ride in a barouche behind a pair of fine horses. And a frock of taffeta in peacock blue. And dress slippers with pearls and rhinestones. And ...

Got you, my fine lad!

A heavy hand fell on her shoulder. She craned her head round and there looking down was the dark man in tweed and a bowler hat. He grinned and his teeth were like marble tombstones. Nobody gets away from Dainty George Paladin.

Joffie did what she always did when her collar was felt – she ran. Or tried to, for the hand held her like a vice and thrust her down hard back into the pew. So she did what she always did when she couldn’t get away. She screamed: Help!  Get your hands off me, you dirty masher! Help me someone! Help!

There were a few people in the church, admiring the tall stained-glass windows and the organ in the gallery. They all turned and stared and Paladin snatched his hand from Joffie’s shoulder as if she had burnt him. She leaped to her feet and dashed down the aisle towards the altar. There was a door down there – a door she had only been through once before and then she had come straight back, but now she had no choice – she had to escape from Paladin.

She twitched back the altar cloth and ducked underneath. The door was low and narrow, and made of sweet-smelling, yellow streak, olive wood. She pushed it open and flung herself through.

She landed on her hands and knees on hot white sand. The glare blinded her, the sand seared her skin and every breath she took scorched her throat. She struggled to her feet and, shading her eyes, she looked around. The sun blazed down like a blast furnace, burning all colour from the sky above and the desert around her, leaving it like ashes. She was the only patch of colour anywhere in her purple coat, her yellow weskit and green trousers.

She thought of the closest thing to home she had ever known, the orphanage in Erdington, but the light was too bright to see the path. She looked up and there on the horizon she saw a smudge that looked to her like trees and shimmering water.

She started trudging towards it. The sand dragged at her feet and the heat lay across her shoulders like a heavy weight. Her throat rasped and her eyes burned. When she lifted her head the trees and the water were no closer, but still she struggled on. What else could she do? She fell to her knees, and started to crawl. Somewhere she lost her cap and her coat and her boots, she couldn’t remember when, but she clung onto the cane as if her life depended on it. She just kept on putting one hand in front of the other, again and again until it seemed that was all she had done for her whole life.

At last she could go no further and she fell face down in the sand. It filled her mouth and nose, choking her.

I’m going to die, she thought and as she lay there she saw the shadow of death coming for her slowly across the sand.

She could smell water. Not the stinking black, oily canal water of Beormingham, all rotting vegetables, dead dogs and manure. This water smelled of fields in the rain and growing things.

She opened her eyes. Above her shadows cut backwards and forwards and the sun flashed between them. Squinting, she could see they were leaves like hands with long, dark pointed fingers on the end of tall, thin, knobbly arms that bent over her. She sat up, slowly and painfully. Her arms were burnt red raw like an Irish navvy’s, the skin on her face was so tight she could barely blink and when she ran her swollen tongue over her lips she could feel blisters.

This was strange. If she was dead, this wasn’t the Heaven they had told her about in the orphanage. Where were the fluffy white clouds and the angels with wings and harps? And the parents she had never known welcoming her with open arms. The way her body screamed every time she moved it felt like she was burning in Hell – except that in front of her was a lake, still and burnished by the sun like pewter and all around it the trees with leaves like hands gently waving at her. And here by her side were her clothes neatly folded and on top lay the cane. She was alive!

She staggered to her feet and stumbled towards the water. As she got closer the sand got wet and dark and squished up between her toes. She fell to her knees and pressed her hands into the coolness. She scooped up a handful of water and trickled it into her mouth. It was warm, brackish and gritty but it was more wonderful than the best fizzy pop she had ever tasted. She did it again but she couldn’t get enough into her hands so she lay full length and plunged her face into the water and gulped and guzzled and glugged.

When she could hold her breath no longer, she burst from the water gasping and laughing. Her hair was plastered across her face and her shift clung to her body. She flung handfuls of water into the air and it made rainbows and diamonds above her. She danced and sang, turned cartwheels and gambols and larked about.

At last, growing tired, she returned to her clothes in such a tidy pile on the sand, and as she looked at them, she started to think.

She hadn’t done that, had she? At the orphanage she was always getting into trouble for not putting her clothes away. And anyway, the last thing she remembered was ... the desert and the sun and the heat and Death coming to get her!  But she wasn’t dead and...

In the sand around her were footprints. She gasped and darted quick glances all around her, but there was nothing but the water and the trees. Hurriedly she pulled her clothes on and holding the cane like a club she followed the tracks. She followed them back where they had come from, she followed them where they went, she searched through the trees, but all around her boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretched far away. She was quite alone.

She went back to where she had started and studied the footprints more closely. In the dry sand they were blurred, but as they got closer to the water they grew clearer. They came in various sizes, some human, some barefooted and some booted, and others that were like the pads of a huge goat. They, whoever they were, had found her in the desert and brought her here. Then they had taken their fill of water and left, leaving her behind.

She was alive, but what could she do now? She had to find her way back to Beormingham. She could always tell when a door was nearby. It felt to her like coming home after being away for a long time and seeing all the old familiar streets and houses, hearing sounds and smelling aromas and stinks you’d grown up with. She could feel it now, but it was very faint. She hadn’t felt it in the trees when she was hunting through them, so perhaps it was somewhere out there in the desert.

She circled the lake again, peering out over the sands, but nothing changed – it was still there, just a vague feeling like someone was watching her, a prickle between her shoulder blades.

Nothing changed – except that tiny black speck far out in the desert. It wavered and stretched in the heat like a flock of starlings over Saint Philip’s Church. She played a game with them sometimes, making them into shapes – a dog, a flower, a ship, a man. She screwed up her eyes. It was a man!

At first just a shadow, a shadow of a shadow, but slowly, as it came closer it changed from sooty smudge to an inky scarecrow with a bowler hat to a man in a yellow tweed suit plodding grimly onwards. It was Paladin! And he’d seen her and started to run.

Joffie turned and ran back to the beach. Nothing made sense. Now there were people in her worlds and there were people like her who could find the doors between them. She needed to think. She had to get back to Beormingham. Where was the door? Not in the trees. Not in the desert. All that was left ... was the lake.

She started to wade into it. As the warm water rose up over her knees to her waist the door feeling got stronger. It was down there at the bottom of the lake!  But she couldn’t swim. Nobody had taught her, and even if she had learnt where could she go? If you fell in the canal, you died of poisoning before you drowned.

She heard a shout behind her, a bellow of rage, a parched gasp, and looking over her shoulder she saw Paladin stumbling across the sand towards her. There was nothing she could do but take a great gulp of air and plunge into the lake. It closed above her head and the noise of rushing water filled her ears. Peering down into the flickering depths like a room lit by a tallow dip, she turned her heart towards home and down there in the darkness was a glow – the door!

She pulled with her arms and kicked her legs, trying to drag herself down and down. Her chest was on fire and it felt as if hands of steel were about her throat choking the life out of her. Black dots swam before her eyes. At last, when she thought she would have to breathe and fill her lungs with water and sink to the bottom as her life bubbled out of her mouth like silver fish swimming to the mirror surface above her, her hand touched something in the silt.

A handle!

She latched onto it for all she was worth and pulled herself down. It was a heavy iron ring and she tugged at it with all her might, but it didn’t move. She tried twisting it, but it wouldn’t budge. With her last breath, when she thought she was going to die, she held onto the ring with both hands and kicked with both feet and the door burst open. Bubbles like fireworks fizzed all around her and she fell through.

CHAPTER TWO

A Cant of Togs

JOFFIE lay for a long time gasping like she had a bellows to mend. Every time she took a breath she got a mouthful of old, dry dust and every time she let a breath out her body was racked with coughs. When at last the coughing waned she sat up and looked round. She was soaking wet but everything around her was bone dry. She was in an attic.

Above her head roof beams like ‘A’s reached away to a distant dormer. In the dim light from the dirty window dust motes turned lazily and grey cobwebs stirred. She was sitting on rough boards and on every side junk was piled up – a brass bedstead, paintings in gilt frames and stacks of books. Bottles, rusted tools, a copper warming pan and an iron kettle. A broken umbrella like a bat’s wing and a cracked jerry.

She got up carefully, stooping so she didn’t bang her head on the trusses. There was something about the place that seemed familiar. She crept to the window and scrubbed a patch clean with her sleeve.

From on high, she was looking down on neatly laid out gardens with gravel paths between clipped box hedges, and silver birch trees in shaved lawns. In the middle of the drive was a tall fountain with eight lions’ heads spouting water and a statue of four children reaching for the sky. She was back at the orphanage!

Never before had she ordered a door to take her somewhere. In the past she had simply followed the path as it took her where she had asked to go. She wasn’t sure if it was a gift or a power, but she had a feeling that whatever it was she should accept it gratefully or use it sparingly. But it made her feel different, as if she was in charge somehow. All her life she had felt as if she was running from what she didn’t know. Now she was chasing something. She was the greyhound, not the hare.

She threaded her way back through the piles of junk and jumble to the low door at the far end of the attic and tested the handle. It turned, and she eased the door open a crack, but the wood was old and warped and it jammed. She set her shoulder to it to force it, but it didn’t budge and then with an alarming crack it suddenly burst open and she tumbled into the corridor in a shower of dust.

She leaped to her feet, ready to run, but nobody came so she crept to the narrow stairs at the end of the corridor. She peeped over the bannister. The smell of baking cakes wafted up from below – the girls were learning their domestic duties down there. For a moment she felt homesick – she missed the company of the other orphans, the routine, up at six, bed at eight and three meals a day, even if it was just gruel and bread for breakfast, potato stew and bread for dinner and bread for tea – but only for a moment.

So what if she didn’t know where her next meal was coming from or where she was going to lay her head that night – nobody told her what to do.

She went on tiptoes down the stairs, only too aware of the wet footprints she was leaving behind her and the dirty smudges she was making on the walls. She came out on the landing outside the library. One of her secret doors was in here, behind the World Geography shelves. She used it when she was sent here to read improving texts when she had been bad – burning her cakes, scorching the ironing or getting her smock dirty. It was when she found that door she had first started to explore the world beyond the high walls of the orphanage. And for the first time she had seen people going where they wanted and doing what they wanted when they wanted to. She saw a life outside the orphanage. It was true there was also death and disease, hunger and violence, but it was worth it for the freedom!

She edged the door open and stole a look in. It looked empty so she slipped inside. It hadn’t changed. Heavy oak bookcases were loaded with heavy books, leather and cloth bound and blocked in gold with titles like The History of Miss Polly Friendly and Tom Brown’s Schooldays – no Penny Dreadfuls here.

Joffie crossed quickly to the shelves with the atlases and books about the British Empire. In a few seconds she would be out of here and stealing a bacon cake off a stall in the Bull Ring market.

Then behind her, a voice hissed:"Joffie? What are you doing here?"

Joffie spun round and there gaping at her was the girl who five years ago had been her best friend.

Verity!

She had hardly changed. She was taller and looked older, but her face was the same, pale and pinched with hungry eyes, her long mousy hair braided and coiled up under a mob cap and still dressed in a knee-length white smock.

How did you get back in? Look at the state of you! What ...

Joffie rushed to her and laid a hand on her mouth and shushed her. I snuck in. I was looking for a ... for a book.

She took her hand from Verity’s mouth, ready to clap it back on again if she screamed. But she didn’t. She pulled her eyebrows down, looking puzzled. A book?

Yes. A book about ... About what? She cast a look around, searching for an idea, and her eyes fell on the cane, there in her hand. ... about this.  She brandished the cane in front of Verity’s face. It’s Chi-nee. I think it’s valuable. I want to find out how much it’s worth.

Where did you get it?

I ... I stole it.  She couldn’t lie to her friend about everything. "It’s how I live since I ran away."

Verity’s eyes widened and hardened for a moment, and then she stepped back and held both of Joffie’s hands in hers and looked her up and down. 

What happened to you? You’re soaking wet and filthy.

I fell in the fountain. But some lies came too easily.

Verity drew her brows down again and chewed her bottom lip, thinking. Joffie knew what she was doing. She was weighing up helping her friend against getting caught helping her friend. Was it worth the risk of a week of beatings and confinement? And Joffie watched her wondering if she would have to knock her down and take to her heels through the secret door.

Verity’s face cleared. She had made up her mind. Wait here, she said. I’ll get you some dry clothes. And casting a worried glance over her shoulder, she hurried out of the library.

Lurking by her secret door that looked just like another bookshelf, Joffie worried at her fingernails. Would Verity come back? And what with? Dry clothes or a parish constable? Would she have to start running all over again?

She heard the library door open