Eliza feels as if she's swimming through the miasma of the plague ward. Paddling from bed to bed, keeping her head above the thick surface of misery and fear. Through the constricted field of view provided by the avian mask's eye holes, she dispenses meagerly-restorative treatments and palliative care, as appropriate. As is often the case with the night shift, is slides around her like a current, devoid of temporal context, and sometimes, linear cohesion. An old woman, blinded by fever, holds her hand and talks to her as if she were a daughter. A man at the third act of a mild case begs to be let loose, so he can avoid exposure to anything else. Eliza and the rest of her shift move down the rows of beds, stripping the empty ones so the sheets can be laundered and put back into circulation.
Charlie is already outside, sitting on the plinth of the looming crusader who glowers, and hoists his hollow iron sword out towards the rest of the city. They both give a parting look to the ward, which is the only building in the area that doesn't feel a hundred years old or more, and is much worse off for that. Half a block of conveniently-condemned rowhouses had been razed to make room for huge box of a building, which had been constructed via large concrete forms that had been poured flat, and then winched up into position. The speedy construction had been necessary, once an agreement was reached that the “temporary” complex of tents and pine sheds in the nearby park wasn't so temporary after all.
The walk home is mercifully uneventful. Too early in the still-dark morning for police, or the witch-finder militia who may as well be police, the only other people out are streetwalkers, panhandlers, and wobbly barflies. People who mind their own business, and at any rate, would respect plague nurses much more than they would the average individual. Eliza can appreciate both aspects of that disposition.
Although she has other reasons for keeping her mask on, as does Charlie, there's a practical reason to retain their professional garb until they're back home. The herbs and quilted paper in the beaks of the masks minimize the rank smell of the last storm. The sewage and drainage systems had been ill-maintained for years, which aggravated what everyone called the mud. Eliza has her own theories about that, as does everyone.
Charlie is dead on her feet by the time they get home, and Eliza is right behind her, judging by her expression and her ginger gait. They hang their masks on the hooks by the doors, under their wide-brimmed hats, and kick their boots off. Charlie ladles some water out of the pot on the cast iron stove, and washes her face over the sink. Eliza collapses into the couch, and starts stripping off the gown and apron. Charlie changes into some old dungarees and a slip, and goes down into the basement.
Charlie had long since converted a large portion of it into a garden for medicinal fungi, while the herbs grow in the upstairs windows while weather permits. She spritzes the logs and troughs of fertilized soil with a big pump canister, checks the furnace's fuel oil, and then allows herself to simply sit in the dark for a minute. Her sensitivity to light had been at high tide recently, even towards gas or electric lamps, never mind the sun. The sun, damn it, was severe to her eyes, which, like her white hair, lacked the pigmentation that most take for granted, even when the symptomology of her other malady was at ebb. Some drugs and therapeutic herbs mixed into petroleum jelly could salve the roaming rashes, and the joint pains could be partially ameliorated by a hot bath with salts, but neither cured either. Which intermingling effects stemmed from one thing or another had always been infuriatingly indeterminate.
Eliza says that her rabbit-like eyes and overly-blonde hair are pretty.
Eliza always was a hopeless romantic, though.
Charlie admonishes herself for being unduly cruel to herself, a thing that Eliza says the rest of the world can provide plenty of on its own. She has also always been, if nothing else, sympathetic to Charlies frustrations with her own body.
Eliza is making dinner, or breakfast, depending on one's point of view, when Charlie reemerges. The fried eggplant, potatoes, and scrapple smell phenomenal, despite the simple and cheap ingredients. Eliza has a relentless talent for making very much out of very little, spending a day out of the week trawling butchers for scraps and offal to mince and cook into puddings and sausages, using starches and buckwheat. Likewise, she's always working cheap vegetables into seasoned fare and preserves. Jars and an icebox, she often says, are the best investment one can make. Charlie knows, deep in her bones, that Eliza will eventually be a vastly-superior chemist to herself, carried forward by her natural feel and deliberation.
Charlie looks at the windows as she eats, which resemble slices of a stream frozen in place, slightly ripply and shot through with tiny bubbles from the rough manufacturing process. She wonders what she would do if one were to break. Put a board over the void to seal against the weather, and live without that window, she supposes.
Eliza reads a little while Charlie cleans the pan and the blue enameled plates. Eliza, always advancing her endless quest to work her way through the literature that Charlie has amassed via her contacts. Contacts, in both the general hustle and bustle of the city's bartering, and among the Crows.
“Ugh.” Eliza winces. “I need a clean shave after that shift. I'll meet you in bed.”
And so, Charlie sits in their bed, staring at the visible typewriter. So named for its ability to display the typing as it happens on the carriage, rather than the earlier versions, which were typed on blindly until the paper emerged. The device is a distant cousin of the immense machines that cast lead alloy into lines of type with machinations several orders of magnitude more complex, which are now hoarded and only used to produce worthless newspapers full of mollifying dreck. Dreck, which was dictated either by the conspiring robber-barons, or the institutional churches that only competed for power when they weren't busy oppressing the “lesser” faiths and creeds that, for their shortcomings, contained the multitudes and histories of their peoples. The typewriter can be a liberating godsend, allowing for the quick production of detailed instructions and recipes, which can be easily read and reproduced. At least, it can be one when she has the ink to recharge the ribbons it uses. It's almost certainly the most valuable thing that Charlie has ever acquired.
She would rather cut her own throat than part with it, as much for its mechanical beauty as its priceless service. It reigns in its little kingdom of the bookcase, seated above the rows of worn print editions, hand-compiled recipes, and documentation from the Crows.
The Crows, who are often called witch-physicians, and serve to be everything from doctors, to chemists, to psycho-analysts, to wandering arbitrators of conflict. They trade information between each other enthusiastically and as a matter of their stock and trade, but almost never with outsiders, even as they help those outsiders. To be possessed of those sorts of skills and that sort of knowledge is fraught, and not for nothing do the reactionary militias often call themselves witch-finders. As they come to the city, they seek Charlie out for herbs, laudanum, local contacts, and especially, the mind-altering mushrooms that can help with certain ways of handling the manifestations of odd things.
The Crows, who had provided her with the starting points to treat her own conditions, and impressed upon her to no longer rely on the crude anesthesia and comforting routine of whiskey and rum. Who also furnished her with rumors that feminine essences could be extracted from animal products, and refined into something useful to Eliza. Eliza has always humored those notions, not allowing herself to be taken in by too much starry-eyed hope.
Eliza plows face-first into the bed, and is out as if someone had flipped a light switch in her. Charlie watches her for a while, and eventually sinks into sleep herself.
A hard rain is tapering off when she wakes up, which means any sort of walking will be miserable. She presses her eyes back shut, hard, and groans. Eliza is reading in bed.
“Would that I could control the weather, dear.”
Charlie sits up, and looks at the wet windows. “Would that I could control whatever demons the goddamned streets are paved with.”
They brush their teeth with the mixture of pulverized charcoal and baking soda, and work away at the chores.
There's a crisp knock on the door as the time to walk to the ward nears. Charlie opens the door to a woman with a sharp jaw, slick black hair, and a very expensive-looking motor coach parked behind her. A big, profoundly-square man stands at attention outside the vehicle, trying to avoid looking fidgety and hyper-alert about what is so obviously his boss, in a neighborhood that doesn't belong to her.
“Miss Olmstead.” She blinks slowly, like an immense sea creature, and bares her teeth. “I'm in need of you and miss Morgan's help. Not, I should note, your charity.”
Charlie doesn't particularly want to know the details of this situation. “We have work.”
“I've spoken to your superiors. They rearranged shifts. Don't worry, nobody will be abandoned.” The woman gestures towards the motor coach with red leather so glossy and smooth that it may as well be blood-covered rubber. “The cash advance is on the seat. I'll allow you two to dress, and gather your preferred accessories.”
Charlie thinks about how very little actual money they have rolled up at the bottom of the dresser drawer full of underwear and socks, and decides that she already resents whoever is darkening their doorway.
Up in their room, Eliza is putting on the lightly-padded underwear that shapes her waist and accentuates her chest. “It pays cash.”
Charlie sighs. “A lot, versus the time and work, is what I intuited.”
As they pack a bag of clothing and items of personal care, Charlie keeps thinking of the hardwood box on the shelf, by the typewriter, which Eliza had never seen the contents of. While Eliza is in the bathroom, collecting her shaving kit and the homemade soap that Charlie formulated to minimize skin irritation, she opens it and looks at the contents intently. The big pistol sits in its compartment of red felt, inert without the laborious, multi-staged process of loading. The full set of tools for cleaning and operation of the revolver are neatly arranged in their own little spots, but for the percussion caps, gunpowder, and bullets required for the “fire” part of “firearm.”
The yellowed poster pinned to the shelf, revealed by the absence of the box, admonishes her.
SPIT SPREADS DEATH
Charlie considers that it would still be quite painful and debilitating to be struck with the butt end of the the heavy thing, and replaces the box while hefting the brass knuckledusters, which were supposedly made use of in trench warfare. A gift, from a concerned acquaintance she's rather fond of.
“My knight in shining armor.” Eliza tosses the toiletries into the bag. “You're going to fight your way out of the monster's dungeon for me?”
“Never go anywhere without a prophylactic, dear.”
The woman who has hired them via a rather heavy hand has eyes that, while strikingly green, have a dulled luster like the turquoise in some of Charlie's old jewelry. Her gaze makes Eliza feel like some sort of specimen under glass, trapped in the motor coach with her, which makes Eliza wonder what that gaze must be like when it's sharp. Charlie's gaze, meanwhile, has the clear, hard edges of finely-cut ruby. The ride feels as if it takes ages, although the other vehicles on the road, both horse-drawn and motor, seem to give it a wide berth. Eliza watches the ancient metal tracks set into the roads as they cross and run parallel to them, thinking about the electric streetcars that traversed the city for a brief, long-past period of civic of futurism.
The estate across the river is large and baroque enough to be mistaken for an old city building, or perhaps a museum operated at the largesse of people like their employer. The marble floors, elaborate carpets, and cavernous ceilings feel deeply alien, as if Charlie had fallen into a distant pantheon or ornate tomb, and Eliza had followed, refusing to let go of her hand.
“Olivia Marsden, by the way,” the woman says as her heels click on the floor. “Yes. Of Marsden and Company.”
Someone wearing a facial prosthetic associated with a grade of injury usually exclusive to trench warfare and grave industrial accidents joins them, as they walk to the back of the building. The type of men – and women - who suffered such misfortunes in factories and mills generally weren't the type to be provided with something so expensive. He avoids eye contact with Eliza, never mind Charlie, not out of aloofness or duty as implied by the large pistol on his hip, but demure nervousness. Eliza can sympathize with his bearing, not particularly enjoying eye contact with strangers herself. She certainly wishes that she could avoid eye contact with Olivia Marsden, as Olivia leads them all to what must be the master bedroom.
Her husband, the titian of industry, the oligarch, is barely alive. His nose and upper-lip are collapsed and dying from what is clearly advanced pox – what was for a while called tertiary syphilis. Semi-conscious, he mumbles something incomprehensible to Olivia.
“He hasn't been able to swallow for some time.” Olivia looks at him with the expression that some state physicians have while noting an outbreak in a slum. “Keep him alive for a short time.”
Clarlie looks down at him. “I don't understand you. You can afford a private physician. You could probably hire them out from under the other people at your dinner parties.”
“You two are more talented in palliative care, and besides, physicians talk. Meanwhile, you understand the necessity of discretion. Do what you must while we get the final details of our affairs in order. Minimizing the pain of such would be ideal, if possible.”
Charlie sucks air through her teeth, and looks at Eliza, who nods. Olivia, in turn, nods at her man, who looks looks up from the floor and walks out of the room.
They open their kits, and begin their work. Eliza applies a dose of laudanum solution under his tongue with a metered dropper, and once the dulling tranquility takes effect, Charlie does the unpleasant part. She slides a greased rubber hose down the most structurally-sound nostril, down the back of his throat and into his stomach, so he can be fed anesthetics, thin gruel, and enriched water. He protests semi-voluntarily, but eventually understands that this is necessary.
The next day and a half go as they do. Charlie and Eliza clean his sores. They sedate, feed, and hydrate him. They empty his bedpan, which he is fortunately filling now that his body has nutrients in it. They monitor him in shifts, trading places every six or eight hours, and eating and sleeping when they can. Eliza gets a lot of reading done, and is glad she brought a substantial book she had only just started. As the man approaches something nearing lucidity, he laments the fact that everyone dies alone. Eliza thinks of some of the books that Charlie had collected, particularly the writings of Marx, which Eliza had found to be easily understood. Likewise, she thinks of the writings of a man called Engels, and the works of those called anarchists.
When Charlie had revealed this part of her library to Eliza, she had said to speak of it only in the company of what she called “fellow travelers” - those who were already like-minded, or trustworthy enough to not betray one to their bosses or the police. She had compared it to practicing homosexuality, or certain other intimate proclivities, and pointed out that many in fact considered them to be part of the same contagion. A social contagion, much more existentially threatening to the powers that be than the actual ravages of the flesh that passed via bad air and contaminated fluids.
Thinking particularly of the Communist Manifesto while he laments his mortal loneliness, with his face collapsed like those of the workers who make the phosphorous matches for his company, Eliza supposes that people die alone because he and his ilk have ensured that they live alone.
Olivia catches Eliza as she's handing the care off to Charlie. She seems less divorced from everyone else's plane of reality, and a little looser at her joints. Perhaps she's drunk, or has taken a little laudanum of her own.
“Would you like to see something?”
“I... don't know...”
“It's not a condition of your employment. It's just something I think you, of all people, would appreciate.”
Leviathan smiles.
Eliza, perhaps against her better judgment, follows her through the labyrinthine mansion, and into something that must be called a parlor or salon. A room of wood paneling and red-and-black wallpaper, full of furniture upholstered in leather and velvet. The paintings on the walls alternate in a dissonant way, going from abstract expressionism to highly-detailed nudes, and then back again. On the far wall, around which the furniture is arranged as if a fireplace, are the two figures. Human skeletons, one with the skull of a wolf, and the other that of a deer or elk. The figures are bound in bundles of red satin stitched into anatomical striations, musculature and organs, freshly-flayed, and garbed in elaborate silk dresses. The wolf is pressing its claws into the ungulate's throat, both frozen in dance.
The figures are riveting, but quickly imbue a deep unease in Eliza. The contradictions within herself heighten, and she feels her insides lurch and twist uncomfortably. She wishes that she could herself be flayed of her own skin, exposing her own slick and gory innards, shaped so that she too could wear finery revealing and feminine. She thinks of something that Charlie had said, once, that she sometimes felt like she had an animal inside her that would howl and scratch at the interior walls of her body, that desperately needed to be loosed and run wild. Just as Eliza wishes that she could wear something so pretty instead of her own skin, she wishes Charlie the freedom to wear dungarees and raise hell in pool halls full of men who could put up an equivalent fight, and to attract women in some of the ways a certain type of man would.
“An affectation. We all have our little indulgences, don't we?” Olivia looks at her wedding band. “From before we fell into place, and did what we needed to do.”
Olivia sits in a chair at a table in front of the display, the only piece of furniture that seems recently-used, and refreshes a drink from a decanter. She removes another glass from the tray, places it next to hers, and holds the decanter over it,. She raises an eyebrow at Eliza.
“No, thanks... I...” She falters, and fumbles with her own words a little. “I have a job to do.”
Eliza retreats from the esoteric enclosure, like an animal escaping a cornering, not looking back. She almost trips on her heels finding the room assigned to Charlie and herself. Her hand lingers on the knob, and she decides that a less claustrophobic respite may help.
The butler, or Eliza supposes, the bodyguard, wanders into the atrium. He looks as if he wants to talk to her. She observes the enormous pistol in the holster on his hip, which appears to be a very different beast than the thirty-two and thirty-eight caliber revolvers the militias sometimes brandish, with their cheap nickel plating and wide-swept hammers that strike the sides of the cylinders. From what she can see of it, it looks much heavier. The dark metal looks much more businesslike and oiled, and the hammer drives straight into the back of the thick frame. The spare shells in the band stitched around the holster seem almost as big as the first two digits of Eliza's index finger.
He looks embarrassed. Moving the edge of his mouth makes his face taut in a way that exposes some scar tissue.
“Ah. Apologies.” He has a little trouble with the enunciation of the letters G and S. “I'm not particularly fond of it. It's the job. Sidney.”
Sidney also has trouble maintaining contact with his good eye, which Eliza can certainly sympathize with. She gestures at the wrought iron chair across from her. He pours some very black coffee from the pot on the service, and then stops, as if realizing that there's someone else present to see him drink it.
She taps the avian cone of the mask. “I'm not a stranger to injuries. And I suppose you would have to be particularly perverse to be fond of... it... by now.”
Sidney fusses with the glasses that hold the prosthesis against the left side of his face. He tilts his head up and to the right so he can slurp some of the black stuff. There's an odd vulnerability to the sequence. Eliza remembers having read about this particular style of facial prosthesis, so prevalent in some places because of the tendencies of Sister Machine Gun and Brother Bomb to dispense ministrations of fire and metal to the faces of soldiers emerging from trenches.
“You two seem... very different. Do you mind if I ask about you?”
His self-consciousness is disarming, and not in a calculating way. Unafraid of him, despite his pistol and his employers, Eliza finds herself telling him about her life. What it is to be a habitual survivor in an age of seemingly inexorable decline, to survive in the dread miasma when so many would otherwise die alone. Finally, she finds herself discussing her relationship with Charlie, in much more intimate and candid detail than Sidney seems to have expected. His face reddens a little, mismatching the carefully-painted tin and bakelite.
“I don't remember much of it,” he says, seemingly for the sake of parity. “I was on a ship for a long time. Then, I was in the trenches... then a ward. It's all very much like smoke in a closed room. It slips out of my fingers and drifts around me when I try to grip it.'
He clenches his hands and looks at the minute gaps between the fingers.
“Whatever happened, it wasn't the gas, at least. I managed to avoid that particular... dread miasma. I suppose someone like you staved my potential infections off, as well.”
Eliza takes one of her gloves off. Sidney does the same, peeling the horsehide away from his left hand and exposing more of that slick-looking, pinkish flesh. The pinky and ring fingers don't go slack like the rest of the glove, instead straightening out as the stumps disengage from a mechanism inside them. They must be some sort of sprung prostheses, which execute a rudimentary grip along with the rest of the hand when manipulated inward.
She runs her thumb along his palm, and then reaches for his face. He doesn't balk as she works her fingertips between the mask and what's beneath it. Then, his eye snaps onto something over her shoulder, and he backs off.
Charlie's voice, sighing, behind Eliza. “We don't know these people. Don't get too familiar.”
Eliza takes Charlie's hand, instead. “Hey. It's alright. He won't bite us.”
Another sigh, this time softer. Charlie quietly scans Sidney, pinning him down with her gaze so he won't leave the chair and bolt like a startled horse. She looks back at Eliza for a minute, and with another sigh, retrieves a tin from her kit. She breaks one of the service's biscuits open and spreads a beginner's dosage of the mushroom-butter onto it, plucks the kerchief out of his breast pocket, and wraps the delivery mechanism up for him. He takes it uneasily.
“Eat this, when you have a few hours to yourself. It will be intoxicating, but not like whiskey, or the poppy liquor I've been feeding your master. It may open some doors in that head of yours. It's easier when someone else is with you, though.”
He looks at the little bundle. “Most things are.”
Sidney snaps out of it, and fumbles a silver cigarette case out of his vest. He offers it to them both as he puts a slim roll of white paper and tobacco in his mouth. Charlie takes him up on it, and watches him realize that his lighter is dry. She hikes the mask up over her own mouth, grinning blindly as she sparks a match from her kit. She leans across the little table and presses her glowing tip to his. Eliza resists the impulse to roll her eyes.
If you wanted to disorient the man, you could have just hit him in the head with a mallet.
“If you feel the need to seek us out for whatever reasons...” Charlie lets the smoke fall from her mouth and curl upwards towards the glass that keeps the sky at bay. “Wait outside the Baltimore Street contagion ward at end of night shift. Don't be followed.”
He exhales, and watches his own smoke rise to intermingle. “I won't go around loudly announcing my intent to attend a black mass, either.”
Charlie grins again.
After some sleep, and back on her shift, Eliza watches the man's slow but inexorable decline. She thinks of all the people – good and bad – she had tended to in the ward up to now, bearing witness and often feeling more like a non-denominational priest administering last rites. Why she would be exempt from this affliction is clear. The pox is transmitted sexually, often in places of great exploitation, hence it frequently being clandestinely suffered by people of station. The masks are a custom in this case, and a degree of psychic separation. Why all the other afflictions, though? Had the illness she had barely survived as a child, which had given her a fever so bad that she had vividly been accosted by imaginary phantasms while her head felt as if it were splitting open, been payment enough to be exempt from the current plague? Did the thing inside Charlie, that made her skin turn painful and red, and inflamed her joints, exempt her as well? Were they both simply talented at avoiding the bad air, contaminated spit, and many shades of blood with the proper precautions? Was bearing this much witness affliction enough?
It would be easy to imagine some sort of cosmic balance sheet, columns of red and black, an order to who gets what in the end. It would certainly explain the rancid mud that occurred alongside the more expected pollution, like offal and curdled fluids roiling up from the soil of America, soaked as it is in blood and exploitation, with its roads paved by bones. It would explain the things that people claim to see at night, around the edges of things.
Towards the end of the second day, Olivia enters with Charlie, nods to her, and leaves as they prepare a much stronger opiate solution. Whatever ink she needed dry must finally be that. He sees them measuring it out, gives his own nod, and allows himself to be anesthetized in finality.
Eliza supposes that many people would die proving their own ill-advised point, and he certainly did that regarding his delirious assertions about the loneliness of mortality.
Charlie watches the road pass by the motor coach from the window. They're going straight back to work at the ward, and work they do. It's almost a relief, to be back, dangerous as it is, working with the breadth of the human condition. They treat coughs, administer fluids, and pronounce a few deaths. They also see a few discharges, the recovered patients shaky and perhaps even injured long-term, as so many are in this world. The end of shift has Charlie longing for their warm bed, in their house as large as the guestroom in the mansion, where she belongs with Eliza.
Sidney is waiting by the statue, which surprises Charlie, and not unpleasantly. It certainly seems to delight Eliza, in her own odd and quiet way. The two seem to share a sensibility, there.
Charlie puts her hands on her hips. “How did my medicinal prescription treat you?”
“It was... interesting. Perhaps I can tell you while we walk.”
“We're dead on our feet. It's been a hell of a few days. We need to hit the hay.”
The animated half of his face falls.
She looks over her shoulder as she turns on her heel. “I didn't say you couldn't join us.”
“Charlie!” Eliza holds a shielding hand up to her beaked face.
She cackles. “Step lively, prettyboy.”
He looks unsure and nervous, and then steels himself, letting Charlie lead. He seems much more animated than he did with his queer rendezvous with Eliza in the atrium, and certainly more so than while under the pall cast by his boss. He seems content to let Charlie and Eliza drive the conversation, occasionally interjecting with a joke and – will wonders never cease – even a little flirtatious back-and-forth, in his own sly way. She's delighted to be reminded of why she considers some men to have their own charms.
And, then, they turn a corner and come face-to-face with a trio of witch-finders. The militiamen are much further from where they usually mill around and cause trouble. They're either lost, or Charlie suspects, drunk and incurring deeper into the neighborhood than they otherwise would. They may have even gotten into some powder of coca, as they sometimes do before looking for a fight. One of them stomps up to Charlie and starts demanding to know what her companions and she are up to.
“If you even are a woman.” He shoves her. “Degeneracy makes fools of us all, eh?”
The other two pull knives. Before they can realize what's happening, Charlie has fitted the knuckledusters on her hand and driven a debilitating punch straight into the mouthy one's solar plexus. He buckles, and she strikes him again. She feels all the fear and anger pouring from the beast inside her chest, out through the arteries and muscles of her arms like the hydraulic fluid of an unstoppable machine. This, she decides, is the final straw. After all the things they've had done to them by people they'd never be permitted to reach out and touch. After being made to be some rich woman's pets while she secured her place as the new head of her dying husband's firm. And now, these bastards, wandering her neighborhood, looking to dispense more pointless suffering, spitting their insults with their contaminated breath that was probably just as dangerous as their knifes and outright violence, disbelievers as they are in germ theory. Sometimes, they must revel in it – making others ill. Dispensing violence by other means.
All of this crystalizes into her fist, wrapped in metallic fury, as she delivers the third blow.
Then, someone grabs her and pulls her off him.
“That's enough.” Eliza.
He spits blood and flails on the sidewalk.
Her perception, as if constricted and focused by a tunnel, loosens up. She sees the entire situation. Sidney is holding a pistol on the other two, still as a statue. The small thing looks no less serious than his other one, although of a different breed built for concealment. Four small-caliber muzzles perforate the business end of the austere, rectangular body. What it lacks in overt power, it clearly makes up for with the icy professionalism of its handler.
He keeps a bead on the would-be street-fighters as Eliza and Charlie lead him down a side street, and they take an alternate route back to the house. Both Eliza and Charlie very much doubt that the militiamen will pursue them deeper into the neighborhood, nor that they have backup at this hour. Sidney keeps the pistol at his side for about a block, and then replaces it into his overcoat. He lets out a warbling whistle at it all.
And then, they laugh, because what else can one do?