The descent into Maggie Doyle's private domain beneath the Anchor felt like a journey into another, more primal world entirely.
Nell led them down a series of narrow staircases and dimly lit corridors, the stale air growing heavier and more oppressive with every step.
Finally, they reached an immense oaken door - its stout planks reinforced with weathered iron bandings that spoke to equal measures of fortification and containment.
Nell rapped out a staccato sequence against the graining before stepping back, shooting Elara a sidelong look.
"Keep it clobbed, birdie. Don't let on if you jolly rock get drizzled lookin' atters."
Before Elara could question that dubious advice, the door's ponderous latches began turning with a series of ominous clunks and rattles.
When it finally swung open with a protracted groan, she fought to keep her composure in the face of the forbidding figure silhouetted within.
Maggie Doyle stood easily over six feet, her towering frame swathed in heavy canvas draperies more akin to milling sails than any proper lady's garments.
What little exposed flesh was visible on her face and hands appeared crisscrossed with a latticework of puckered scar tissue - badges of countless vicious skirmishes barely survived.
Most disconcerting of all was the woman's eyes, one a pale, rheumy orb and the other a polished obsidian sphere segueing seamlessly into the ridged and twisted socket around it.
As those mismatched lenses brazenly raked over Elara from crown to toe, she understood with a ghostly chill why so many of the Borough's hardiest rogues instinctively averted their gazes before this indomitable matriarch.
"You're late, child," Maggie rumbled in a voice like dockside gravel. She jerked her head brusquely toward Nell. "And unless this one's cozzered at divinatin' what the Fancy blessed me for breakfast, then I'd wager you must be the...falconer, I've been dripped wind of these past few orts."
Elara blinked, automatically straightening her spine under the unnerving weight of that terrible gaze.
Despite her private reservations, she could all but feel the mantle of her former station reasserting itself alongside her regal poise. Clasping her hands demurely before her, she lifted her chin in the faintest of nods.
"I am she, though I fear you have me at a disadvantage, Mrs...Doyle, is it? As for my being late, you'll have to blame Nell here - I'm afraid I still find myself quite... adrift, in the nuances of your local parlance."
The corner of Maggie's ravaged mouth twitched in what might have almost passed for an approving smirk.
Or perhaps it was simply a reflexive tick born of decades spent weathering all manner of audacious pretences and deflections from the dregs of humanity.
When she spoke again, it was with unmistakable authority and certainty.
"Save your gameys and peckshuffters for the punters, Missy. Down here, we shallows what we mean and mean what we slubberdegullions plain."
She jerked her head toward Nell again in clear dismissal. "You. Out. I'll drill when you're needed."
Nell shot Elara one last look - an odd mixture of silent warning and something almost like... respect. Then she was gone, whipping around to leave them alone in the stygian chamber.
The solitary door groaned shut behind her, its ponderous locks thudding back into place with finalizing clicks.
Only then did Maggie Doyle design to turn her full, terrible attention back to her unanticipated guest.
For what seemed an eternal interim, she studied Elara in cold silence - her single unblinking orb dissecting while the obsidian one seemed to stare inward just as keenly.
Finally, after several more torturous moments had passed, she moved with an uncanny economy of motion to deposit her immense frame into a high-backed oaken chair to Elara's left.
With only a subtle inclination from that disquieting gaze, the meaning was clear - she was to take the lower, plainer seat positioned before Maggie in a show of obeisant decorum.
Swallowing hard against a sudden constriction in her throat, Elara complied. She could feel those mismatched eyes boring into her from point-blank range now, no doubt cataloguing every tell-tale crease and flutter of consternation in her expression.
The sheer, oppressive weight of Maggie's relentless scrutiny was like nothing she'd ever experienced - a psychic battering that made it an active effort just to remain upright and maintain her studied poise.
Moments shuddered into small eternities as the matriarch continued her silent appraisal. Not a single tremor of respiration or flicker of movement disturbed her exacting consideration of this singular interloper.
Just when Elara felt her ironclad decorum might finally shatter under the strain, the graven baritone role of Maggie's voice ricocheted from the chamber walls.
"So...t'Fancy's sent us a real one, by the look of it." The dark, skirled chuckle that followed could have curdled dairy from fifty yards off.
"Thought we'd pranced past the last of your dowager ilk a'thest twenty annums back. But then, the world's still got a few chuckrubs and ogles left in her, don't she?"
Those piercing eyes glinted almost slyly from their devastated sockets. "The real skull-thresher is how a cracked-polly prick-finch like you found your trotters skitting all the way down here amongst the Ape's barmy bodkins, eh?"
The sudden manic CRUNCH of that granite jaw working savagely upon its own gnarled musculature caused Elara to flinch before she could subdue it.
"Well, chub-a-duck? Don't go starving on me now. This Ape'll keep chiming til she hears the downies on how you pitched from your silken bridzers to dodging gullickers and badblokes like the lot my Anchor pads around."
With a sinking sensation, Elara realized she'd been well and truly outmanoeuvred before the true vetting had even properly begun. Any hopes of guarded half-truths or prevarication were utterly nullified by Maggie's uncompromising, pathologically canny manner.
If she wanted to survive this crucible - let alone claim any hope of sanctuary under the Matranker's aegis - she would have to peel back the final layers of her former self until only the rawest, most elemental truths remained.
Forcing her composure to reassert itself, she fixed Maggie Doyle with a look of chilled, implacable resolve that would have made her etiquette tutors instantly familiar with horror.
"Very well... you wish to sample first the bitterest drafts of my present condition." She drew a bracing breath, the words already cohering and forming the bitter shape of her confession.
Elara drew herself up proudly, her shoulders squaring as she met Maggie's disquieting stare with an unwavering gaze of her own. "My storied 'path' and former circumstances are hardly germane, Matranker."
She allowed just a hairsbreadth of regal disdain to bleed into her tone. "Whether through destiny's fickle gales or mere hazard, I have been divested of family, status and even name itself. Those particulars are interred casualties of circumstance, as inscrutable to me as they are immaterial to our present audience."
Lifting her chin a fraction higher, Elara's luminous eyes bored into Maggie's with crystalline intensity. "I am myself, remade anew in whatever reigning guise Fate's tempests have sculpted me. An undressed falconer, nameless and awing to none save my own drives toward...reclamation, shall we say."
A faint, mirthless smile played across her full lips as she continued in that cultured, yet utterly adamant cadence. "Whether I shall one day successfully re-inherit my forfeited self is a wring yet Written. The sole pressing urgency is that of my present survival, Mrs. Doyle. And whether you deem me fit to claim even temporary harbour under your revelatory auspices."
For an eternity of seconds, a heavy silence reigned within the stygian chamber. The only Sound that of their mingled respirations - Elara's own controlled and focused, Maggie's a strident rasp like a whetstone against steel.
Then at last the Matranker's ravaged mouth parted, exhaling a bemused huff of breath that might have bordered on admiration from another soul.
"Well now, Elara Fancried..." That mirthless chuckle skirled forth again, sending prickles along the nape of the younger woman's neck.
"Your nacker for mouthin' the jammer's a cheery one, ain't it just? Got yourself a right mother's vigor, you have - all purpill'd up an' bobbed to the gills like a barrelled slubberdegullion badmashed whilst shukkin' their morrions."
Maggie's obsidian orb seemed to bore straight through Elara as she leaned forward, the twin hollows narrowing contemplatively.
"Nuttin' like a prilled polly gone brockagain by the scrapple-lickers o' this world to spark up a fresh buska in their chuckboxes, am I so?"
Elara held herself utterly motionless, neither assenting nor demurring as the Matranker continued her dissection.
"Well I'll be flitched for a quarterbag if'n you ain't gone bezetted by your own vineheres and jiggers! Here you hike - a bonnytog doll-pup ramped out them silken bridzers and plum dodged down into our Ape's own bodkin-lipped quethe. Yet rather'n crackin' an' fambling at the josser like the other gor-bellied murrens whatre fetched up here, you've tucked in your cheethams and pitched me a rambang like you was Christened to the bodge!"
Propping her elbows on the chair's intricately carved rests, Maggie steepled her gnarled fingers pensively beneath her prominent chin.
"An' here's me meant to be puttin' the skritch on what roker of badblades or gullywhoppers smashed that ivory coach you dollymops pranced about in to Yankee splinters, eh?"
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