Beneath London (39 page)

“It’s my duty to view Mr. Harrow’s body, if you don’t mind.”

He nodded again and waved her inside. The dim room was perhaps twenty-feet long and ten-feet wide, with a wooden bench along one wall. Sunlight shone through a bank of filthy windows at either end. There were broken gravestones heaped in the corner, and sundry shovels and barrows. Cut planks, ready to be nailed together into coffins, were stacked alongside crates of nails, and there were hammers, saws, chisels, and sundry other tools hung neatly on the wall above the bench. The floor was trodden dirt, and the smell of death was enough to make Alice’s eyes water. Six coffins lay upon wooden horses, all of them closed up, thank goodness, except for one that was empty, the lid leaning against it, waiting to be set into the top and nailed down. The watchman went to one of the closed boxes, removed the top and set it aside, and then stepped away and motioned Alice forward.

She peered into it, holding her breath. Within lay a long-dead corpse, a man’s corpse, its flesh withered, its eyes staring, its lips shrunk back so that its teeth and gums seemed to stand out. Obviously this could not be Harrow’s corpse. There was no sign of a wound in the forehead. The corpse’s coat gave a small twitch now, and a rat leapt out from beneath the arm, sailing with a loud squeak out onto the floor and running out through a hole in the wall.

Alice trod backward, her mouth opening to speak but unable to make a sound. The watchman, standing at her back, threw his arms around her shoulders, and another hand snaked around and covered her mouth with a cloth smelling of a sweet chemical. She held her breath, struggling to free herself, but she couldn’t move – another man obviously having joined the first, his free hand clutching her hair. She gasped for air finally, drawing the chemical into her lungs, and within moments she felt her hands tingling. She began to fall but was held upright, and she knew that she was beyond fighting. She thought of Mr. Lewis, his sending her here, sending the boy Jenkins out with an urgent message. In the next instant the world went dark, and her mind fell silent.

* * *

B
ill Kraken found Mother Laswell at the door of Temple Church, and without wasting a moment they hurried back along Fleet Street and onto the Strand, Mother telling the story of seeing Finn Conrad at the window, the note that he pitched at her, about the woman called Miss Bracken at another window, and about Clara in the coach with Shadwell, and no harm done to her, except Miss Bracken was being misused.

“So he
seen
you?” Kraken asked unhappily.

“He did, Bill. He might not have known me. I can’t be sure.”

“It’s much of a muchness whether he did or did not, Mother. If he did and he wanted to catch you, he would have done it.” Bill took her by the hand now and picked up the pace, so that Mother had to hurry to keep up.

“This is
good
news, Bill,” Mother said to the back of his head. “They’re all safe, it seems, except that poor woman from the inn.”

“It’ll be good news when we get them out. There’s the church across the way, Mother. Alice was to wait for us in the chapel.”

They crossed the road and opened the chapel door. Mother uttered a small, surprised, “Oh,” when she looked up at the coffered ceiling, painted in shades of deep blue and decorated with gold stars. Several people sat at the pews, but Alice was not among them, and Kraken immediately turned around and went out, muttering the words, “Damnation hell.”

Mother Laswell followed him, around the side of the chapel and into the lonesome churchyard behind. Again, Alice was nowhere to be seen, only a solitary man smoking a pipe in the open doorway of a shed. A horse and wagon with a coffin on the bed stood nearby. The man took the pipe from his mouth and gestured with it, nodding at the two in greeting.

Kraken hurried toward him, speaking out in a loud voice. “We’re a-looking for a woman who was just hereabouts.”

“The dark-haired beauty, you mean? She was here indeed. Not fifteen minutes past. I’m to tell you that she went on to the King’s Head, on Maiden Lane, across the road and take the left turning. She’d been walking all morning, she said, and needed something cool to drink.”

Bill shouldered past him, into the shed, and the man followed him, Mother Laswell at his heels.

“She’s gone on,” the man said, “as I told you. It couldn’t have been but a few minutes since.”

“If you’re a-lying,” Bill told him, “and you’re thick with this piss-ant Klingheimer…”

“There’s no call for that tone, Bill,” Mother said, taking him by the elbow. “We’ll just nip around to the King’s Head, like this man says. If she’s not there, and they haven’t seen her, then we’ll come back here for another chat.” She looked at the man, whose face was blank, and said, “Do you hear me, sir? We’ll take you at your word, but it will go ill with you if you’ve lied.”

“The lot of you is stark crazy,” he said, “coming in here and blackguarding a man. ‘Another
chat
,’ by God. If I see you again
I’ll
take it ill.”

“Then you’ll eat a blue pill, you hell-bent snipe,” Kraken said.

“Now,
Bill
!” Mother said, leading him out through the door. “We’d best find Alice and get on about our business. We’ve got trouble enough without making more for ourselves.”

Bill pulled his arm away, but went along with her, looking back twice before they were around the corner and walking up along the chapel again.

“You shouldn’t have uttered Klingheimer’s name. It’s not
safe
,” Mother said.

“This here pipe-smoking, brazen-faced shite, he’s got a liar’s eyes, and I can’t abide a liar.”

“Don’t
dwell
on it, Bill. Here’s Maiden Lane, just as he said, and there’s the public house yonder, a nice enough place, it seems to me. We can have a pint of something ourselves when we’ve found Alice. Catch your breath, Bill.”

They went in through the door, the pub half empty and no sign of Alice. “I’ll inquire of her, Bill,” Mother said in a small voice. “If the publican hasn’t seen her we’ll go back to the chapel straightaway.”

“She’d be here if…” Kraken started to say, but Mother stepped up to the bar and began to speak to the publican. When she turned back a moment later, her face stark, Kraken said, “You’d best wait in the chapel, Mother, whilst I parlay with that bugg… that scoundrel.”

She followed him out the door and up Maiden Lane again. “No, Bill,” she said. “Two is better than one. I wish I
did
have a pistol.”

“Pistols is noisy, Mother. Did you see the tools a-hanging on the wall? A man don’t like the look of a sharp saw, not if it’s lying over his throat.”

They had just crossed the road, nearing the chapel, when the horse and casket-bearing wagon that had stood in the churchyard issued from the cobbled path. The man driving the wagon saw the two of them and whipped up the horses, out into the traffic on the Strand, making away in the direction of Charing Cross, where he nearly ran down a trio of old men.

“Shadwell!” Kraken shouted. He gave chase, running at a loose-limbed gallop, dodging between carts and carriages, caroming off a chaise, the driver slashing the whip at him.

Mother Laswell stood helplessly on the pavement, watching him disappear and feeling utterly empty. She knew beyond doubt that it was Alice who had been borne away in the coffin on the wagon. She strode up and down, looking in the direction that Bill had taken, and at last she saw him hurrying back. He was evidently tuckered out, and he came along with a limp, his trousers torn open along his bloody leg.

“What have you done to your leg?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “Caught the hub of a wagon on my shin. It was that Shadwell, and no doubt, and Alice in the box, or I’m a Dutchman.”

“It
was
her, Bill,” Mother said. “I sensed her clear as I’ve ever sensed anyone, although it wasn’t so when we were in the reek of the dead house. She’s
alive
, Bill. They’re taking her somewhere. If they wanted her dead, she’d be dead already.”

“Let’s have a word with Mr. Pipe,” Bill said. “Put me right, Mother.”

She straightened his hair, wiped blood from his chin with spit and a kerchief, and took up the flap of torn cloth from his trousers and simply glued it to his bloody leg.

“We won’t fool that man for more than a moment,” she said. “We must take him unawares.”

Kraken jerked his head in agreement, and the two of them strode around to the back and across the graves toward the empty doorway. They saw the pipe smoker at the bench, turned away from them. Bill rushed silently upon him, his hands gripped tightly together overhead. He clubbed the man hard, striking him to the ground, his pipe flying from his mouth. He rose to his knees, and Kraken knocked him sideways with a second heavy blow, the man lying stupefied, his wits addled. Mother had closed the shed door and latched it.

Kraken fetched a piece of rope from beneath the bench and whipped it around the man’s ankles, tying them tight, and taking the loose end and doing the same to his wrists. He put a foot on the man’s stomach now and hauled the rope upward, hanging it between the open jaws of a bench vise, so that the man dangled there like dead game, his lower back just touching the ground.

Mother brought Bill a saw, handing it across to him just as the man opened his eyes and stared around himself, stupefied. “
Bluff
,” she whispered, “Or it’ll be you that’s looking at a rope, Bill. Hear me now.”

Kraken gave a curt nod, took the saw by the handle, and ran his finger along the blade to test it, immediately drawing a line of blood that he showed to the man as an illustration.

“What the bloody hell?” the man croaked.

“Hell is just the word for it,” Mother Laswell said, leaning over him and looking into his face. “My companion wants very badly to saw your head off.”

The man stared up at her face, which was set like a stone mask, and she reached down and pinched him hard on the ear. “That’s meant to clear your mind,” she said. “Alice St. Ives – is she alive? Mind that you tell us the truth this time, as you value your neck.”

He managed to nod.

“I’m a-going to saw out his vocals,” Bill said. “He’s murdered Alice. It’s nothing but lies with the likes of these here by-God cutthroats.” Then he laughed aloud. “Did you catch that, Mother? A ‘cutthroat’ I called him!”

“That’s wit for you,” Mother said, as Bill laid the saw across the man’s throat, allowing gravity to bear it down so that small pinpricks of blood rose beneath the teeth of the saw. The man lay deadly still, breathing hard and making small sounds in his throat.

“No, sir!” he gasped out. “She’s
alive
, by God. She ain’t dead. He didn’t want her dead.”

“
Who
didn’t want her dead?” Mother Laswell asked. “Who is this ‘he’? The truth now!”

“Shadwell! Him who drove off in the wagon.”

“Where to?” Mother asked.

“I don’t know!”

Bill pressed lightly on the saw, letting the weight of the instrument make his argument for him.

“It’s a place over near Harley Street, and now I’m a dead man for saying it.”

“Give us an address, and we’ll set you free.”

“Wimpole Street, top end, number fourteen, with a gatehouse on the street. Elysium Asylum, it’s called, run by a man named Peavy. That’s God’s truth. It ain’t the first time they’ve done it, neither.”

“With your
help
, they did it,” Mother Laswell said. “Cut him down, Bill, and we’ll heave him into one of these coffins and nail down the lid. If he’s lied to us, he’ll have time to consider his ways, as the Bible recommends. If he’s told the truth, we’ll come back and set him free.”

Bill sliced the rope with his clasp knife, and the man slammed to the ground.

“
You won’t put me in no box!
” he shouted.

“On the contrary, that’s just what we’ll do,” Mother Laswell told him, “as you did to our friend.”

Bill hauled an empty coffin beside the trussed up prisoner, who tried desperately to roll beneath the bench, but managed simply to jam his shoulder under it, his face in the dirt. Kraken tilted the coffin on its side, and he and Mother Laswell rolled the man easily into it and then heaved the box upright. Bill picked up the lid, at the sight of which the man jack-knifed upward, and Mother Laswell slapped him hard across the face. He slumped downward, startled by the blow, and Kraken put his foot on his neck.

“Here’s the thing, cully,” Bill said. “You lie still, and I’ll put some holes into the box so’s you won’t smothercate. If you’re a-lying, you won’t never see us again. Mayhaps you can shout the lid open. If we find Mrs. St. Ives, and she’s fit, we’ll send word to the chapel, and you ain’t dead after all.”

“You have our word on that, sir,” Mother Laswell said, and the man looked from one to the other of them, still shaking his head.

Kraken fitted the lid onto the top of the casket and pounded a half dozen nails into it. Then he drilled two holes through the lid with a heavy auger, cast the tools aside, and the two of them went straight out into the windy afternoon. The graves were cast in cloud shadow now, the wind blowing the high grass. Mother Laswell put the padlock through the hasp and locked the door. They heard a wooden thumping from within the shed now, along with a muffled shouting, although from ten feet away it was scarcely audible.

* * *

T
he hansom cab carrying Hasbro and Tubby Frobisher rattled along, returning them to the Half Toad in Smithfield. The morning had been a waste, and Tubby stared bleakly out the window. “Dead boys, forsooth,” he said. “Klingheimer is shutting us out is what he’s doing, and the Board of Works is abetting him. If boys were discovered with legs and necks broken, they were certainly pitched into the pit a-purpose to bring this to pass, although I’d bet a fiver there were no boys at all.”

“Certainly the thing was contrived,” Hasbro said, “but unless I’m mistaken, Major Cantwell is doing his duty as he sees it.”

“And I must do my duty to Uncle Gilbert. If Klingheimer has closed this passage, then there’s a passage that he has
not
closed. I don’t for a moment believe that he has shut
himself
out of the underworld. I want to know where it is, this other passage. I’m incapable of cooling my heels at the Half Toad when the answer to the mystery lies with Klingheimer and his minions.”