Laura Swanson

Chapter 12: Mortimer's Ascention

  The fog returned the way it always did—without apology, without memory. By dawn it had stitched the Thames back together, suturing night to morning until London looked whole again. The city pretended it had learned something. It never had.

  Laura Swanson felt it before she saw it. Not a name. Not a face. A pressure. The subtle redistribution of fear that followed every vacuum of power, like water finding a new channel once a dam gave way. Harlan was dead in everything but pulse, Caldwell Senior cold and covered, Blue Hour dissolved into Crown auctions and ash. The city should have exhaled.

  It didn’t.

  She stood beneath the viaduct near Blackfriars, coat collar turned up, watching men she didn’t recognize move with practiced ownership. They weren’t Harlan’s type—no theatrical swagger, no ornamental cruelty. These were quieter men. Clerks’ coats. Undertakers’ manners. The sort who paid their debts early and remembered names too well.

  Change had come. That was clear.

  By midmorning the broadsheets were already late. They always lagged behind the truth, reporting bodies and trials while power slipped through alleys and signatures. Laura folded one under her arm anyway, the ink still damp. ASSIZES PROCEED AS SCHEDULED. CROWN SECURES BLUE HOUR ASSETS. No mention of the dockside whisper that had reached her by breakfast.

Mortimer.

  The name traveled softly, passed hand to hand like a coin too valuable to clink. She heard it in Limehouse first, from a woman selling tea who never sold tea. Then again near the Exchange, muttered by a runner whose shoes cost more than his wages. By evening it had reached Mark Bell, which meant it had already settled in.

  Bell found her at the same chophouse, same table, same gas mantles hissing their small defiance. He looked older than he had two nights prior, as if sleep had failed him on principle.

  “You feel it too,” he said, not bothering with greeting.

  Laura stirred her coffee. Steam rose, indecisive this time, curling back on itself. “Power doesn’t like silence.”

  Bell leaned in. “He’s clean. That’s the trouble. No priors worth ink. No scandals we can dress up for Parliament. Comes in through trusts and warehouses, not knives and theatrics. By the time we see blood, it’ll already be ritual.”

  “Mortimer,” Laura said.

  Bell nodded once. “You know him?”

  “I know the type.”

  She did. Mortimer was not a replacement. He was a correction.

  That night she followed the current east, where warehouses pressed their shoulders together like conspirators. Dockworkers moved with an efficiency that felt rehearsed, their eyes tracking patterns Laura recognized too well. She watched from shadow as a ledger changed hands—no rush, no fear. Trust like that had to be purchased early.

  Mortimer arrived without announcement.

  He stepped from a carriage that bore no crest, his boots clean, his coat unremarkable in a way that took effort. He was younger than Harlan had been when the empire peaked, but older in the eyes—measured, pale, reflective. A man who listened longer than he spoke because he already knew most of what would be said.

  No guards flanked him. None were needed.

  He spoke briefly to the men assembled, voice even, almost kind. Laura couldn’t hear the words, but she saw the effect: shoulders straightening, hands steadying, a collective recalibration. Orders delivered as assurances. Violence postponed indefinitely.

  This was worse.

  She followed him later through streets that pretended to sleep. He walked with purpose but no hurry, like someone who had already arrived everywhere he intended to go. When he stopped beneath a gas lamp and lit a cigarette, she stepped out of the fog.

  “You’re early,” Mortimer said without turning.

  Laura smiled faintly. “You’re late.”

  He turned then. His face held no surprise. Only interest.

  “Laura Swanson,” he said. “I wondered when you’d make yourself known.”

  “You move fast,” she replied. “That usually means you were already moving.”

  “Empires don’t fall,” Mortimer said. “They shed skin.”

  She studied him. No signet rings. No overt symbols. He wore nothing that could be taken from him and turned into evidence. “Harlan thought he was eternal.”

  Mortimer exhaled smoke, watching it thin into fog. “Harlan thought noise was power. He believed fear had to be loud.”

  “And you?”

  “I believe fear prefers routine.”

  There it was. The philosophy. Blue Hour had been spectacle. Mortimer was infrastructure.

  “You’ll be hunted,” Laura said.

  He nodded. “Of course. By men who understand yesterday. That buys me time.”

  “You’re replacing him,” she said.

  “No,” Mortimer corrected gently. “I’m removing the vacancy.”

  He stubbed out the cigarette with care, as though the ground mattered. “You cut knots, Miss Swanson. Admirable work. But knots re-form when tension remains.”

  Laura felt the familiar tightening in her chest—the recognition of a pattern closing. “You’re smarter than him.”

  Mortimer met her gaze. “I’m quieter.”

  She didn’t draw the flintlock. She knew better now. One shot solved men like Caldwell Senior. It did nothing to systems.

  “What happens to the trade?” she asked.

  “It stabilizes,” he said. “Less blood. Better margins. Fewer children with sawdust lungs in the streets where Parliament can see them.”

  “And the opium?”

  “Redirected. Medical fronts. Colonial contracts. Respectable suffering.”

  Laura laughed once, short and humorless. “You dress it well.”

  Mortimer inclined his head. “I intend to keep it dressed.”

  He stepped back into the fog, already receding, already myth. By morning his name would be spoken with the same inevitability Harlan’s once carried—minus the tremor.

  Laura walked until dawn, thinking of Caldwell’s ring rolling to a stop, of knots tightening under clean hands. She stopped at the river and watched the fog lift again, obedient and false.

  Bell found her there hours later. “We missed him,” he said.

  “No,” Laura replied. “You met him.”

  She turned back toward the city, coat heavy, resolve heavier. Mortimer would build something that looked like order. That was always the most dangerous shape.

  London breathed. The knot held.

Except it didn't.

  It didn’t hold.

  Not the way knots were supposed to—tightened with care, dressed neatly, trusted to endure strain. What Mortimer built unraveled the moment it began to believe itself permanent. Power always made that mistake. It mistook silence for stability, obedience for loyalty, routine for control.

  Laura felt the first tremor three weeks later, when a body surfaced near Wapping with no theatrical flourish to explain it. No calling card. No excess. Just a dock clerk with his throat opened cleanly, pockets still full, hands scrubbed postmortem as if someone had tried—briefly—to restore dignity. That was wrong. Mortimer’s men were trained for discretion, not mess. This wasn’t his language.

  Bell brought the report himself, face set in a way Laura had learned to distrust.

  “Two more,” he said. “Same cut. Same care. Different crews.”

  She didn’t need to ask what that meant.

  “Internal,” she said.

  Bell nodded. “Or external, wearing his skin.”

  Mortimer’s order had stabilized the trade, just as promised. Violence dropped. Bribes flowed through cleaner channels. The streets grew quieter in the way cemeteries were quiet—maintained, deliberate, deceptive. That quiet bred ambition. Men who thrived under chaos now found themselves suffocating under structure. Mortimer had given them schedules, quotas, margins.

  He had forgotten hunger.

  The first fracture came from Limehouse, where an old Blue Hour lieutenant named Griggs had survived the purge by pretending to understand the new rules. Griggs had smiled at Mortimer’s meetings, nodded at his ledgers, swallowed his resentment with imported gin. Then he began skimming—small at first, clever enough to look like error. When Mortimer noticed, he didn’t punish him publicly.

  He corrected him.

  That was the second mistake.

  Correction taught men where the lines were. Punishment erased them.

  Griggs didn’t die. He disappeared. And disappearance, unlike death, invited interpretation. Within days, whispers replaced assurances. Mortimer’s men started carrying knives again—not to use, just to remember what they felt like in the hand.

  Laura followed the pressure west this time, where money pretended to be respectable. Trusts collapsed quietly. Shell companies failed to renew paperwork. A shipment meant for Bombay rerouted itself to Lisbon and never arrived. Someone had learned Mortimer’s system well enough to exploit it.

  “Someone from the inside,” Bell said.

  “Or someone who helped build it,” Laura replied.

  Mortimer had relied on accountants, clerks, men who believed numbers could tame blood. When one of them vanished—a soft man named Ellery who smelled of ink and peppermint—the ledgers began contradicting themselves. Columns disagreed. Dates slipped. Trust evaporated.

  Order needs belief. Mortimer’s men began checking locks twice.

  Laura saw Mortimer again on a rain-flattened evening near St. Paul’s, standing beneath scaffolding that creaked like old bones. He looked thinner. Still composed, but alert now in a way that edged toward fatigue.

  “You were right,” he said, as though continuing a conversation they’d never finished.

  She didn’t pretend surprise. “About?”

  “Knot tension,” he said. “I underestimated it.”

  “Systems break where people live inside them,” Laura said. “You can’t regulate appetite.”

  He smiled faintly. “I thought I could redirect it.”

  “Where did you redirect yours?”

  That landed. Mortimer looked past her, toward the river, where fog clung stubbornly to the waterline. “I believed restraint was strength.”

  “And now?”

  “And now restraint looks like weakness to men who remember fire.”

  The collapse came fast after that.

  Griggs resurfaced long enough to die messily in a warehouse Mortimer had converted into a distribution hub. The message was crude, almost nostalgic. Mortimer answered with precision—raids, arrests, quiet executions that left no witnesses alive to appreciate them. Violence returned, no longer ceremonial, no longer controlled.

  The knot slipped.

  Bell worked three nights without sleep, chasing phantoms through alleys that had learned new names for old crimes. Parliament demanded explanations framed politely enough to insult everyone involved. Newspapers rediscovered adjectives they’d been saving.

  And Mortimer began losing men.

  Not to Laura. Not to Bell. To each other.

  He tried to tighten control—more meetings, more structure, more reassurance. The city responded by resisting in the only way it knew how: sideways. Deals were made without him. Routes bypassed his approval. A parallel order formed beneath his feet, quieter, crueler, less ambitious. It didn’t want the city.

  It wanted him gone.

  Laura found the end before anyone else noticed it was near. A clerk—barely a man—slid a folded note across a café table without meeting her eyes. An address. A time. No name.

  She arrived alone.

  Mortimer waited in an unfurnished room overlooking the river, coat folded neatly over a chair, hands bare. No weapons. No guards. The city had decided already.

  “I built something clean,” he said, not pleading, not boasting.

  “You built something fragile,” Laura replied.

  He nodded. “Clean things break first.”

  Below them, the Thames moved on, indifferent.

  “They’ll replace you,” she said.

  “Yes,” Mortimer agreed. “Not with order.”

  “That was never an option.”

  He looked at her then—not with calculation, but with a kind of tired clarity. “You cut threads. You don’t choose what comes after.”

  “No,” Laura said. “I just make sure it’s honest.”

  She didn’t kill him. She didn’t have to.

  By morning, Mortimer was gone—whether into the river or into exile no one could say. His name lingered for a week, then thinned, then vanished, absorbed into the city’s long memory of almosts.

  London adjusted. It always did.

  The knot hadn’t held—but it hadn’t disappeared either. It had changed shape, loosened in places, tightened in others. Laura stood again with her coffee, watching steam rise and twist unpredictably.

  Not eternal.

  Just persistent.