Horatio Lyle (13 page)

He followed Lyle up towards Green Park, but at Haymarket Lyle seemed to change his mind and cut north again up a wide road adorned with heroic statues and stately clubs, a clean, far cry from the brothels that co-existed just a few blocks away under roofs held up with strategically perched planks and mouldering below gutters of stagnant green water. He followed him all the way back up to Piccadilly Circus, starting to wonder when Lyle was going to tire of his sport. Suddenly, in front of a new building that narrowed to a desperate point on one corner, Lyle stopped, bent, scratched the dutiful Tate behind the ears, straightened up, surveyed the clattering jungle of streets hung over with the perpetual smoke and haze of London, and briefly took off his hat to swipe a finger along the sweatband across his forehead.

Underneath his hat, Lyle ’s hair was black.

The man with the crooked top hat and taste in ginger biscuits stopped dead, almost in the middle of the street.

Underneath his hat, Lyle was not Lyle. But Tate was definitely Tate, and as the man watched, the dog turned and started trotting away back towards Covent Garden seemingly without a care. He tried to follow the dog through the crowd, but quickly lost him, and before the man knew it he was standing in a heaving mass of people pushing and shoving towards Regent Street. He stopped again, and scanned the crowd with a slow, intense gaze.

There was no sign of Lyle. Anywhere.

He started walking, nearly a run. He doubled back, avoiding the dangerous narrow streets to the west of Regent Street that led into the notorious, cholera-ridden, smoke-drenched, crime-ruled dens of St Giles, and marched determinedly back towards the wide expanse of Green Park. The second he stepped on to the grass, oppressed by the blackened trees that dotted it here and there, he stopped again, and his gaze swept the park. No sign of Lyle.

He marched quickly through the park, stopping every now and again to turn and scan every face that passed. Then he walked again, almost running, sending ducks scattering around the stagnant brown lake, as a smelly, acrid rain began to drizzle, that spattered the damp mud and sounded like a distant muffled drum.

He stopped one last time as the rain thickened to a grey blanket, and people started scurrying for shelter, collars turned up. He saw couples sheltering under coats and running for trees or gazebos; workmen trudging on with the same resolute expressions; children, filthy, black with soot and grime, dancing under the water as the dirt flowed down their faces and into their brown clothes. He saw a woman in green; a man in a black overcoat, his collar turned right up against the rain, darting under a tree with a newspaper over his head; a man in corduroy; a man in tweed; a woman in plain wool; a horse in harness. He thought, for a second, he saw a dog of uncertain parentage, ears trailing in the mud, rolling over and getting himself thoroughly dirty in glee, but when he moved towards the dog it saw a pigeon and started barking, galloping away through the rain and sending up a spray of water behind it, overwhelmed with enthusiasm for this new cause.

The man gave up. He turned and started to walk west.

Lyle watched him go.

When the man was more than forty yards away, just a vague shape in the rain, Lyle shook the water off the newspaper he held over his head, did up the last button on his black coat, pulled his collar higher around his chin, and followed. Tate, turned brown with the mud, padded along behind him.

 

At its very north-western corner, Green Park joins Hyde Park’s south-eastern corner, after which Hyde Park bends sharply north up Park Lane, where the carriages with the padded seats and expensive ladies of taste and tastes clattered around, looking for someone to keep them company. And just behind Park Lane, tucked into a surprisingly well-kept street that bordered the slum of hidden factories mazing the narrow byways behind the wider, more popular arteries of the city, was a mews. The stables were empty, the horses being out on their long day’s work. Above the stables and occasionally in them were the homes of the horses’ owners: messengers, cabbies, and costermongers with their carts. Beyond these stables was a house that might once have been luxurious, but now was crumbling, old red bricks cracked from neglect, windows half-covered by tatty curtains. Through a small door below these windows darted the man. He bounded up a flight of stairs that shook and warped under him, pushed open a loose door and went into a room, empty except for some furnishings covered over with dust cloths that would never be moved and a few mats on the floor. Sitting around a small fire set in a cauldron in the centre of this floor were a group of Chinese men. They paid the man no attention as he strode in, unwinding his long red scarf to reveal his worn face in full, and stripping off the coat, to toss it lightly into a corner.

A man with a fat pigtail almost down to the bottom of his back, looking out of place in an overlarge waistcoat, said serenely in near-accentless English, ‘Why are you back so early?’

‘He knew I was following.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘He went to great pains to lose me.’

‘That is unsatisfactory, Feng Darin. What are you going to do to remedy the situation?’

Feng Darin stared thoughtfully out of the window at the rain. As he watched, a shadow, greyed in the rain, sandy-red hair soaked dark brown and clinging to its scalp, looked back up at the window. At his side, brown mud trickled off a dog. In the rain, the man seemed to smile, then turn slowly and walk away.

‘Feng Darin,’ repeated the man with the pigtail from inside the room. ‘What are you going to do to find him again?’

‘I won’t have to do anything,
xiansheng
. He has found us.’

The other man smiled faintly, and nodded. ‘If he can find us, Feng Darin, he can find the Plate.’

‘Before the Tseiqin?’

‘We can only hope.’

Feng sighed. ‘But hoping is too passive,
xiansheng.
The Tseiqin have no hesitation about taking matters into their own hands. I think we should not hesitate either.’

‘Well then? What are you doing standing here?’

CHAPTER 8

There was one other place Lyle wanted to take Tate that day, and it was on the other side of town. He found a hansom cab and sheltered inside, shivering from the rain pelting the loose cab window and drying on his coat, while water slowly pooled around Tate at his feet. The wet weather brought premature darkness down on London so that, even though it was still morning, the whole city had the feeling of dusk, before a long night.

The driver of the cab wouldn’t take him closer than half a mile, and even then he took convincing. The Bethnal Green rookery was cold, dark, damp. Out of dark doorways dark faces leered; from the broken crooked windows in blackened crooked walls, tattered rags serving as curtains flapped wetly. Under each passage and arch across each street, pipes dripped on to mildewed surfaces; at the end of each street refuse mouldered; between each courtyard and alley there was a cellar through which people passed as a common thoroughfare, dipping in and out of a darkened doorway that opened up through a smoky wall. Not even the most intrepid costermongers ventured into the heart of the rookery with their wares or carrying anything more than a few pennies. Children gambled on the edge, hiding behind shattered crates dumped on ruined muddy streets. In the heart of the rookery, boarding houses boasting no beds and only a partial roof hid scowls that lurked around each bubbling wrought-iron pot where strange concoctions slowly burnt black and each inn was full of the silence of broken men taking their tankards too seriously to be safe.

Lyle padded through all this, hands deep in his pockets, chin buried in his coat, avoiding the glares that flew his way, Tate trying to pretend he wasn’t with Lyle at his side. Barely the only people attempting to ply their wares were the patterers, who leapt out of doorways to thrust in Lyle’s direction pamphlets with titles like ‘The Serving Girl Surprised!’ followed by a suggestive picture that promised worse inside. Lyle scowled, shook his head and scurried on.

There was one place inside the Bethnal Green rookery that resembled civilization, and even then it was a civilization in decline. Lyle found it through a half-open crumbling door a few steps below street level, above which someone had hammered a sign reading ‘House of Pr’ before someone else had come along and broken off the other half of the sign for some other purpose. He pushed open the door and stepped into a darkness that stank of tobacco, opium, sweat and cheap make-up made from ground lead. Faces lurked in the shadows, and those that weren’t lost in some other world glared at having their rest interrupted. A stair at one end led up to an unseen fiddle player whose instrument possessed no more than three strings. The sounds of drinking and pattering feet accompanied him in occasional loud gales of shouting that lapsed again into an alcoholic silence. Lyle walked to the stairs, but didn’t climb them, turning instead to a small door tucked just behind them, bolted, with a sign crudely written on it in charcoal, ‘kep owut ’. He knocked on the door. After a second it opened and a very large man with a crooked nose that hadn’t healed properly from when it last broke, and a pair of lips so cut and bruised they barely resembled a mouth any more, glowered at him. ‘Keep out,’ he growled, indicating the sign with a huge, bulging finger.

‘I need to see the Missus.’

‘Keep out!’

‘Just tell the Missus Mister Lyle is here, please.’

The door slammed shut. Lyle waited, leaning into a corner, trying to look unobtrusive in the smoke. Someone lying on a pallet by the opposite door was starting to whine in a high-pitched, if undeniably happy voice that sounded like a frightened cat mewing. The door unbolted again and a new face appeared. It was round, possessed more chins than its owner had fingers - of which three were missing on the right hand, just stumps remaining - above a large red, low-necked dress stained in more mysterious ways than Lyle wanted to speculate on, and was topped by a huge yellow wig that in low-ceilinged houses presented something of a fire hazard. It beamed at Lyle.

‘Horatio! Come in, come in.’

He sidled uneasily into the room. The woman glanced at the large man skulking in a corner and said imperiously, ‘Go.’

The man lumbered out, his face impassive. The door closed behind him. Lyle looked round the room. A huge, dirty and cracked mirror dominated one corner, a sofa another, the stuffing showing, and another wall was obscured by equally damaged dresses of a similar low-cut nature, and wigs to match. His eyes fell on a desk in front of the mirror, laden with pots and brushes. He picked up a pot at random, sniffed it, frowned and said, ‘This smells of belladonna.’

‘Mistress of the night,’ replied the Missus with an overdramatic flourish.

‘Hallucinogenic,’ replied Lyle reproachfully, putting the pot down again. ‘How are you, Mrs Gardener?’

She drooped herself over the end of the sofa, waving a long white hand airily. ‘As well as can be expected, darling boy. And you? Are you
still
trying to cure society’s ills?’

‘Only as a hobby, Mrs Gardener. But I do have a favour to ask.’

‘
Favours?
Horatio, dear, I thought we established that all debts are repaid.’

‘All right - an exchange.’

‘You’re not going to be so vulgar as to offer
money
, are you?’

‘Ma’am,’ he replied with a faint sigh, ‘I couldn’t compete.’ Lyle dug into a pocket, rummaging around deep inside before he found what he was looking for. He pulled it out triumphantly, held it up and said, ‘Burn one teaspoon in your room whenever you have an attack, inhale the fumes and it ’ll temporarily reduce the breathing difficulties.’

She took the pot, lifted the lid and peered suspiciously at what was inside. ‘It’s a powder, not a herb.’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s it made of?’

‘It ’s chemically derived.’

She frowned. ‘Have you tested it?’

‘Yes.’

‘On
people
?’

‘Once, yes!’

She sighed, and the pot disappeared somewhere into the desk next to her. ‘Well, I trust you, Horatio Lyle. More than the quacks who call themselves physicians, at least. And what do you desire in return?’

‘Information, please.’

‘It’s
always
information with you, Horatio, my darling boy. How do you expect our relationship to develop like this?’

‘I need to know about Bray.’

Her expression darkened. ‘Bray?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why do you want to know about him?’

‘I’m looking for him.’

‘For yourself, or for
them
?’

‘If by “them”, you mean the bobbies, no, not necessarily. It depends what he has to say.’

‘Horatio, wouldn’t it be simpler for us all if you let him be?’

‘Why, where is he?’

She sighed expansively, leaning back and away from him, to study his face from an angle. As the silence stretched, he shifted uneasily and said, ‘Ma’am, I’m not leaving until I have an answer. A
good
answer, I mean.’