Chapter 210: Chapter 210
Chocolate, of course, couldn't come along. Miss Audrey instructed the maids to look after the cat. After watching its master leave with the bold woman, Chocolate remained languidly sprawled on the sofa.
It lifted its amber eyes, and noticing the maids were momentarily gone, it lazily climbed up, leaped onto the table, and flipped over the two face-down cards.
The card representing the past was blank. This card was like the Joker in a deck of playing cards, or the Fool in a tarot deck. In the mystical arts, its meaning leaned more toward concepts like beginnings, the unknown, and mystery. It was the most special of the major arcana.
The card for the future, however, showed a blue cross-shaped symbol with a loop at the top. This symbol was a letter from a lost language, pronounced something like "Ankh." Thus, it was commonly known as the Ankh cross, representing eternal life or resurrection.
The cat's eyes narrowed. It used its paw to return the cards to their original positions, then waited with a swish of its tail for the servants to bring its food. Even if its master wasn't one to care about the quality of life, a cat was still a noble creature.
Although Enchanters could use rituals to create many temporary supernatural items, like charms, the cost of such things was measured in units of ten pounds. Moreover, Enchanters possessed extremely sharp senses. Using an ordinary charm was tantamount to announcing, "This is not my true appearance." Any reasonably observant Enchanter could see through the deception in an instant.
More advanced charms, such as the "Elegant Lady's Makeup Charm" obtained from Hathaway, offered superior concealment but came at a much higher price. This was why she had merely disguised herself for Mr. Hood's gathering instead of using a charm.
The charm had been free, yet Jenkins still felt a pang of regret for using it.
He and Miss Audrey acted like an ordinary couple, chatting as they trailed the man from a distance. Just as he was considering whether to break off the pursuit and take a different route to avoid suspicion, the man ducked into a small alley.
It was a dead end. Less than twenty meters from the entrance stood an unpainted brick wall, its corner piled with a mess of trash and suspicious waste. Flanking the alley were two-story buildings with no handholds for climbing aside from the windows. Set into the left wall was a tightly shut iron door.
The iron door was rusted, but judging by the scrape marks on the ground and the relative cleanliness of that particular spot, it was still in recent use.
“I confirmed earlier that he's just an ordinary person,” Jenkins stated. “So it's impossible for him to have flown away.”
The man could only have disappeared through that wall or that door.
Fortunately, Jenkins was accompanied by Miss Audrey, who excelled at divination. She had him stand at the mouth of the alley to block the view of any passersby. Then, she deftly plucked a thread from his collar and tied a white crystal stone from her pocket to its end.
Jenkins noticed a point of light—one of Miss Audrey's abilities—begin to glow. A moment later, the suspended crystal defied gravity, swinging toward the iron door.
he complained. This was the suit Mary had bought for him before he moved out, the very one he'd worn to the reading salon.
The woman didn't apologize. Instead, she handed the piece of thread back to him. “Here you go.”
Jenkins immediately took it, wondering whether to throw it away or sew it back on when he got home.
Miss Audrey obviously hadn't expected him to do that. She paused for a second, then broke into an unconcerned laugh.
Jenkins turned, reached into his pocket, and pulled out two coins. Seeing a scrawny, dark-haired boy kicking a pebble as he walked toward them, Jenkins tossed a one-penny copper coin at his feet.
The boy was startled by the coin suddenly rolling past him. He instinctively bent to pick it up, and when he looked up and saw the intimidating young man standing at the entrance of the dark alley, his face went deathly pale.
“S-Sir, I'm sorry, is... is this yours?”
He held the coin in his hand, stuttering, and took a few steps forward, but he couldn't muster the courage to get any closer to the alley's entrance.
Jenkins tried to offer a friendly smile, but it only made the boy tremble more violently.
“Am I really that frightening?”
he wondered, glancing around. The street was quiet, with few pedestrians, and no one was paying them any mind.
“Answer a question for me, and this silver coin is yours, too.”
He brandished the shilling in his hand. The boy looked at him in terror and nodded like a chicken pecking at grain.
“Are you from around here?”
“Y-Yes, sir.” The source of thɪs content is nοvelfire.net
Jenkins suspected the boy might faint from fear at any moment.
“Then do you know where this door leads?”
He pointed to the door behind him. The boy glanced into the darkness and backed away again in fright. “Sorry, sir, I don't know. I never go into secluded alleys . But I do know that the building here belongs to the Bronte Club.”
Club culture was a unique, almost morbid trend of the era. In this age, steam trains and horse-drawn carriages ran side by side, gentlemen wore high collars that threatened to slit their throats with a single misstep, and ladies were swaddled in layers upon layers of restrictive lace.
Where there is suppression, there must be release; the more severe the surface restraint, the wilder the undercurrents. The original Jenkins had loitered on the streets all day, but only with a group of youths his own age, engaging in petty mischief in his own neighborhood. But based on the shadowy side of the world Jenkins had glimpsed since arriving—the thriving underground world of vice, the male prostitutes and back-alley streetwalkers in the slums, the noblewomen obsessed with spiritualism, the gentlemen's clubs that were, in reality, little more than brothels—it was no different from the Steam Age he remembered.
This almost fanatical obsession with gentlemen's clubs was a cultural phenomenon of the age, a vulgar trend that someone like Jenkins found utterly repulsive and incomprehensible. Thanks to their strict privacy rules and draconian membership policies, these clubs existed in every corner of the city as semi-open, semi-closed social institutions. It was worth noting that a club was not merely a physical building or organization; it was a pivotal element in the realm of male society—a world with which Jenkins was equally unfamiliar. It represented a style of social interaction and a pattern for survival built on a certain consensus. At the same time, in the world Jenkins came from, it was also considered one of the iconic symbols of nineteenth-century English culture.
All of this was to say that without an introduction, it would be very difficult for Jenkins and Miss Audrey to gain entry into this so-called “Bronte Club.”