Beneath London (18 page)

“Yes and yes,” the boy said. “And you?”

“From Aylesford. Can I ask you whether you saw a coach driven by a man in a green felt hat, a low, flat topper. If he wore no hat then he was bald atop. A girl might have been with him, riding inside, a blind girl with smoked spectacles.”

“I did, an hour back along the road, with its lamps lit, which is how I know it was your man. It was the girl caught my eye, looking out through the window. The coach lamp lit her face, do you see? She wore the spectacles like you said, although she looked square at me and pressed her elbow to the window, so I don’t know as she was blind. I couldn’t see her eyes through the spectacles.”

“An hour, do you say? Moving right along?”

“Aye. You’ll not catch them between here and London, not astride a mule you won’t, unless she can run like a thoroughbred. If you’d like supper, come along with me. You’ll travel snug on a full stomach.”

“There’s nothing in life I’d like better, but I cannot. But it’ll be right cold before dawn, and if you’d part with your coat, I’d pay you double for it.”

“Would you now? How much?”

“Would a crown do it?”

“It would,” said the boy, and he divested himself of the coat and handed it up to Finn, who took out his purse and found the coin, which he handed over before pulling on the coat and putting his purse away inside it. “Good luck to you, then,” the boy said, going on his way.

Finn set out again at a settled, steady pace, grateful for the coat. Now he knew where he stood. Catching up with the coach was impossible, unless it stopped along the way, which was unlikely. Perhaps it had put in at the Queen’s Rest for a time, which would explain how it had been hereabouts so recently. He must pin his hopes on the address near the river, and if that came to nothing, then he would do what came next, which was unavoidable – what came next was what one always did.

He let his mind wander as it would, and he looked up now and then at the moon in order to calculate the passing of time. He held further conversations with Ned Ludd, who listened with great interest. For a time he fell asleep, awakening and catching himself as he was falling out of the saddle, and realizing that he was on top of a hill, and that there were the scattered lights of a great city ahead. Greenwich, he thought, and the Thames twinkling beyond, tall ships moving downriver with the tide. Ned Ludd had found his own way while Finn slept, like Black Bess when she carried Dick Turpin two hundred miles from London to York in a single long night.

Gray Ned
, he thought,
An Heroic Mule
. A mule could certainly be made heroic in a poem. He had never tried his hand at poetry, and so it was high time that he did. As a test he undertook to find a rhyme for “Clara,” which seemed easy enough. But nothing came to him at first except
Sarah
, which, being her mother’s name, would not do.
Sahara
, he thought with some satisfaction – the great desert wasteland. But what would Clara be doing in the Arabian Desert, after all? Would she need rescuing?

He thought of George of Merrie England, astride the horse Bayard, riding into Egypt, and considered Finn Conrad, astride Gray Ned, riding into London Town to slay the dragon Shadwell. He tried his hand again at rhyming – dragon, flagon, wagon – saying sentences out loud in order to keep Ned Ludd amused. And so the time passed, Finn trying to fix the better flourishes in his mind so that he could recall them later when circumstances lent themselves more readily to writing in his notebook.

It was still well before dawn when he passed beyond Greenwich, traveling now among a growing throng of people going into London, many with full carts and wagons, bound for Covent Garden or Brick Lane or Portobello Road. When the western sky was pale and the stars faint, he rode along Borough High Street, past the church of St. George the Martyr, to which he tipped his cap. He turned into the courtyard of the George Inn where there worked a stableman that he knew, an ancient Welshman named Arwyn who had been stableman in Duffy’s Circus, shortly before the death of Finn’s mother, when Finn had left the circus for good and all.

There was a fire burning cheerfully in the yard, where he found Arwyn dressing the leather seat of a hearse, the red-trimmed black paint glowing in the firelight. “Well, Finn, you’ve come into London again,” Arwyn said to him. “Last I heard you was oystering with Square Davey.”

“I’m in Aylesford now, living among good people. I’ve got an elephant to care for.”

“I’ve always liked an elephant,” Arwyn said, “when they was treated right.”

“Strange carriage,” Finn said. “Is Death putting up at the George?”

“So to say, but at St. George Church up the way. I put a polish on it before the day starts. Who is this fellow, now?”

“Ned Ludd. He’d have been the favorite of Duffy’s Circus, Arwyn. A better mule never drew breath. Can you keep him for two days?”

“That I can. Put your money away, Finn.”

Finn shook Arwyn’s hand, and assured Ned that he would return for him. As the mule was led away toward the stable, Finn pitched the handbill that he carried into the flames. It wouldn’t do to be caught with such a thing about his person. He went into the inn, and ten minutes later set out across London Bridge, eating a breakfast of bread and cheese out of his hand.

FOURTEEN

“
T
here it lies – Aladdin’s cave,” Gilbert Frobisher said to St. Ives, the two of them standing atop a makeshift staging platform over the dried mud and rock of the sink-hole. The debris from the collapse – building rubble, rock, and mud that had flowed in from the Thames – ran steeply downward from where they stood. St. Ives could make out broken furniture, shattered lumber, pieces of brick wall and chimney – a disaster that could not be put right, but must simply be buried and forgotten. A set of stairs leading to a wooden causeway angled out over the debris, the causeway extending thirty feet farther.

Rearing up behind the two men stood the shoring along the Thames: oaken beams six-inches thick affixed to deeply sunk posts, the river swirling past beyond. The tide was making, and rills of water ran out from between the planks, so the platform was dank and slippery. The odor of the place was indescribable – fetid water, wet lumber, and the rising smell of the bodies that would remain interred beneath the amalgam of sand, crushed rock, and tar that would very soon fill the hole. The quarried granite pavers of the restored embankment would serve as gravestones.

Due to the death of James Harrow, the Board of Works had foreshortened their expedition. They were to be in and out in six hours. St. Ives and Gilbert Frobisher would carry their own gear in knapsacks, enough for an afternoon jaunt, but not for real scientific work. A lantern hanging on a post at the end of the causeway illuminated Tubby Frobisher and Hasbro, who had shuttled out the last of the gear – a Ruhmkorff lamp with its attendant induction coil and battery, compasses, a coil of rope, and other odds and ends chosen hastily from the mass of equipment that Gilbert had hoped to take along. The lamp, with its delicate Geissler tube, was packed away in a basket and padded on all sides by pine needles stuffed into cloth bags. St. Ives’s multifarious knapsack contained the induction coil and battery together, which filled the central pocket. It was surrounded by further pockets that were accessible from the outside – some of them coated with India rubber to serve as collecting bags – so that he could add or remove what he needed without disturbing the machinery within.

St. Ives heartily wished that Tubby and Hasbro were going along, for although he had a high regard for Gilbert Frobisher as a generous, decent man, it had to be admitted that Gilbert was getting on in years and was sometimes dangerously spontaneous. He weighed something in the vicinity of eighteen stone and was easily winded. Early this morning Gilbert had been warned by a Mr. Lewis – his ‘agent’ inside the Board of Works – that the Board was threatening to disallow the expedition altogether, what with the unfortunate death of poor Harrow. There were rumblings of disapproval from James MacNaghten Hogg himself, the Board’s Chairman, who was sensitive to any hint of scandal or misjudgment after recent accusations of corruption. The sink-hole had taken a mort of lives, and the expedition had an ill-fated air to it. Lewis had suggested that they set out early in order to avoid being done out of their adventure entirely if they waited.

“If the sun would rise above these infernal clouds,” Gilbert said, removing his pith helmet and wiping his brow with his kerchief, “you could make out what appears to be the very slightly arched roof of a small gallery down and to the left, far down the slope – a natural gallery, I believe, narrow at the opening. It was there that the auk was discovered, remarkably preserved and couched in a bed of foul-smelling fungi that had affixed themselves to the creature, perhaps slowly devouring it, or so Harrow speculated when Lewis gave him the creature. What lies beyond that dark portal, no man knows, although the two of us soon will, by God.”

“The fungus must have been devouring the auk very slowly,” St. Ives said, “unless the bird had recently died, which would mean, of course, that the auk isn’t extinct at all, but was somehow living happily underground. The bird was not recovered, then, after Harrow’s debacle?”

“No, sir. Like as not it’s far down the Thames. I mourn the loss of that bird, I can tell you, and of course the loss of the man.”

“Was there anything…
amiss
when they found his body?”

Gilbert looked askance at him. “Amiss?” he asked. “Why, the man’s brains were dashed out, or so I was told. The imprint of the horse’s shoe was visible on his forehead. That’s amiss enough for most of us, I should think.”

“Did the police allude to any sign that he might have been misused, I mean to say, any deviltry? You say that the body had already been removed?”

“
Deviltry
?” Gilbert gave him a long look now, evidently not having considered the idea. “If you’re suggesting murder…?” He shook his head. “The body had been taken away, like I said, and so I can confirm nothing. The police had no suspicion of foul play, however, unless they were keeping it to themselves. No, sir, it doesn’t stand to reason. Harrow had no enemies. It’s a simple business to my mind. The fates played James Harrow a fiendish trick on the very eve of what would have been his greatest adventure.”

“Indeed they did,” St. Ives said. “Let’s pray that they are kinder to us.”

“Here’s our sunlight now! Do you see it, the mouth of the gallery?”

“I do,” said St. Ives. He could just make it out – impossible to say what lay beyond. Still and all, the dark archway was full of promise and mystery, and St. Ives found that he was abruptly as anxious as Gilbert to be underway. It would be a damned shame if they were cheated of their chance through no fault of their own.

Tubby and Hasbro loomed up alongside them now, having ascended the stairs, Tubby looking anxious. “I wonder if this is a good idea, Uncle,” he said. “I’m leery of the two of you going down into the darkness alone. If one of you is injured, there’s damn-all that the other can do to get the injured man out.”

“In that case the uninjured man will hurry topside in order to summon help from the two of you,” Gilbert said. “This is a grand opportunity, Tubby. Its like will never come again in my lifetime. Surely you don’t begrudge me this chance?”

“Of course not, Uncle. I…”

“Then let us hear no more about it,” Gilbert said in a rising passion. “You’ve been curiously insistent on nurse-maiding me, Tubby, for reasons that are clear to me. If you want to do me a
real
service, join Miss Bracken aboard my yacht and make friends with her. She’s likely to be your aunt one day, you know – Aunt Cecilia. Have you considered that?”

Tubby was apparently struck dumb by the statement. Before he could answer, a trio of noisy gulls landed on the bulwark behind them, perched for a moment, and then flew straight through the sink-hole and into the mouth of the cavern, caught in the sunlight for a moment before they disappeared in the darkness beyond, off on their own expedition. St. Ives shook hands with Hasbro and then turned away and headed down into the darkness, Hasbro going off in the other direction, leaving the two Frobishers alone.