Lawless and The Devil of Euston Square (38 page)

We talked of the Exhibition too. Three weeks it had been going and our panic was gradually subsiding. With a list of foreign dignitaries as long as my arm, we were calling heavily on politicians to stand in for the absent royals. Mr Gladstone was signed up for Pearson’s trial run. Mr Disraeli kept giving stirring speeches. The low attendance figures were attributed to economic malaise in the wake of Albert’s death. But we had fulfilled our function. Indeed, perhaps we had overreacted. Perhaps Berwick had just wanted to scare Bertie off Nellie. Maybe now that Bertie was far away, Berwick would try to win her back – though whether he was in Brisbane or Bethnal Green I could not be certain.

A little tipsy, I went to check their grandmother clock in the hall, while Mrs Wardle talked away, ten to the dozen.

“It’s a great relief to me that he has an agreeable assistant like yourself. Last chap drove him potty, dotting i’s and crossing t’s.” She unclasped the window and looked out. “Oh, he was that upset when Albert passed away. So many years he’s worked for him. It makes you afraid too. What if the things you were promised get forgotten? Ever since he was your age, Jack’s said he would retire at sixty and spend his dotage back in Yorkshire. There’s a cottage he has his eye on, a lovely place with a garden, and a stream for his fishing. He deserves it. We both do.”

I oiled the guilty sprocket and delicately set the pendulum swinging. Not too hard. I went over to stand by Mrs Wardle, looking out at her husband working in the garden. Seeing him there, away from the fight of the town, with the rich evening sun glinting through the trees, I liked him more at that moment than ever before. He too held secret dreams. Long-cherished dreams, never secure. Would he be happy away from the bustle? Why not? Why couldn’t a man have two sides so different?

“Yes, Mrs Wardle. You deserve it.” A rose nodded before the open window. I leaned forward to smell it, but it was dried up with blight or worm. All I could smell was the oil on my fingers.

THE SIXTH PERIOD

(MID 1862)

THE BUGLE – ARTICLE IN THE BEEHIVE – CODE BREAKING
WORM CORNERED – HAIL & FAREWELL (NARRATIVE OF
RUTH VILLIERS) – AQUAE SULIS (LAWLESS’ NARRATIVE RESUMED) – FINALLY NELLIE – THE GREENHOUSE
THE VENGEANCE

EUSTON EVENING BUGLE

12th June, 1862

OUR FRIENDS FROM ABROAD

Whence this welter of strange accents prevalent across the capital today?

The discerning
Bugle
reader will identify around town exhibitionists of every extraction, hoping to cash in on a bonanza as big as the fair of ’51. Sadly, our great Queen’s refusal to celebrate her Silver Jubilee has cast a pall over the nation in general and in particular over the “Not-So-Great Exhibition”. Nonetheless Captain Fowkes’ Conservatory has attracted thirty thousand expositions and innumerable foreign dignitaries, at a cost to the nation of four hundred thousand pounds.

The well-informed money is on Bessemerised steel and its upshots, such as the HECC’s new hydraulic network alongside Pearson’s underground train. Their next proposal is a visionary scheme to underlie the whole city. Water, pressurised through reinforced piping to five hundred and forty pounds per square inch, will power not just dockyard machinery, but West End curtains and Mayfair elevators. Do we sniff a Royal Statute?

The biggest seller remains the stereoscope, that larksome device which will turn us all cross-eyed.

The biggest dodo is a new type of hobby horse. Made of metal in place of wood, this “bi-cycle” employs an ingenious pedalling device to propel it forward. Shame, then, that only a circus acrobat could hope to keep it upright, and the saddle sits so high from the ground that a fall at speed would inflict grievous injury upon the intrepid rider.

The other influx of accents is due to discontent in the hungry north. The Cotton Famine caused by our American cousins’ inconsiderate Civil War has brought the Lancashire mills to a standstill. Talk of riots, turmoil and a militia rising may be exaggerated, but the
Bugle
advises you to look after the shirt on your back.

What greets these incomers to the world’s greatest city? Apocalyptic hoofbeats, fires, famine, and the spectre of King Cholera re-establishing court over the East End, our own Father Thames a bringer of plague.

THE PIT INTO WHICH WE ARE PLUNGING

Even the ever-optimistic Charles Pearson seems defeated. The Member for Lambeth promised us the greatest engineering project since the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Yet the opening of his “Metropolitan Railway” has been postponed again, the Board of Safety unimpressed by his “smokeless” engines. Undoubtedly, the public will not trust the scheme until the engines are run by a well-known and trusted company, for instance the Great Western.

The
Bugle
can also reveal that “certain remains” dug up during works have been stolen from the company offices. Pearson declined to comment, but the
Bugle
has discovered that the remains include human bones. These relics date back centuries, but some are doubtless from more recent explosions of the Fleet sewer: recall the Poor House blast of 1846. Medical students purchasing cut-price skeletons should beware, lest, in saving a few pennies, they catch typhus from their own forefathers.

Nonetheless, the Metropolitan’s trial run, at the end of May, impressed shareholders. Mr Gladstone, they tell us, though reluctant on entering the catacomb, seemed impressed by the 3¼ mile dash from Paddington to Farringdon.

Yet the
Bugle
received contradictory reports, describing how “a shrieking, as of ten thousand drones, rises up beneath the thunder of the wheels. One has Tartarean visions of accidents, collisions, crumbling tunnels. A fierce wind takes away the breath. This, then, is the living instantiation of The Black Pit into which we are now plunging.”

Tartarean indeed. Such is the folly we like to style Progress.

Conclusion of Article in The Beehive, by Berton Kelswick, prints by John Martin, RA:

… Such are the degradations of Clerkenwell’s rookeries.

Besides such shame, the East End is also renowned for its primordial sense of justice. “Doing the rights”, they call it there. This justice is exacted any weeknight outside the borough’s taverns whenever there is a promise broken, work unpaid, or profit made from another’s pain. In our land divided into two nations, what will prevent this vengeance from spreading beyond the borough’s bounds?

When Noah built his ark in his back garden, hundreds of miles from the sea, his neighbours thought him deluded. Reasonably so, you might say – though your scepticism would have got you drowned. The Chartists’ petition of 1848 was a manifesto of delusions, we were told; ideas such as union rights and the universal franchise, we were told, are further from sense than Noah’s garden from the sea. Thus were we fobbed off with diluted reforms and promises of a new Jerusalem among these dark satanic mills.

Beware! If the trusting common man, who toils unheeded to shore up the floodwaters, should open his eyes, he will lose patience. There will come such a quake as has not been felt since Samson ripped down the pillars of the temple. There will follow a deluge to wash the guilty from their palace of indolence. If the common man should also be sacrificed in this shake, at least he will die with his eyes fixed upon Noah’s great rainbow, but those responsible will end deep in the circles of the inferno, enduring for eternity the punishment to fit their crimes.

There may be times to silence the deluded. There are also times to heed delusions, lest they turn out to be visions.

CODE BREAKING

Wardle came into the office white-faced. “Bloody Worms. Never get one when you want one, then they deliver nonsense like this. What do you make of it?”

He planted the note from Simpson squarely in the middle of my desk:

“Initial Analysis of Bones, requested by Sergeant Lawless. The specimens derive from many different bodies: age varied, both sexes, date and cause of death indiscernible at this remove. I can tell no more on such pitiful evidence, save that they are all human.”

Wardle stood there, waiting for my explanation. All I could do was clench my teeth and screw up my eyes in frustration.

My night-time encounter with Smiler had left me with several headaches. In my exhaustion, I could barely comprehend the ramifications. As the Exhibition got into full swing, I sat down to write the report of my operation. Only then did I realise quite how much I would be forced to conceal.

I sent to Bazalgette, thanking him for his help, and mentioning in passing that his tosher had not appeared. I was taken aback to receive a frosty response. The fellow had been sent, all right, but he had never come back to work. His friends had all vanished into the aether with him. If I had not arrested the fellow, he could only assume that young Numpty had seen me from afar, panicked that their game had been rumbled, and taken his troop underground.

Bloody Numpty.

It was less than a year since Worm had saved my life, when the sewer fever took me. Besides Bazalgette’s valiant plea for clemency, I was damned if I would get Worm’s chums needlessly into hot water. After all, there had been no more thefts since my encounter with Smiler; they had got the message. Several men already languished in gaol for the crimes. Why bring down Wardle’s wrath on a hapless gang of urchins who, for all they had led us a merry dance, had stolen nothing more than pennies, curios and sprockets?

Yet I now had it on Smiler’s authority that Skelton was involved. I was shocked to discover that the two cases were intertwined, and I badly needed Wardle’s help to make sense of it. But in my report for him, I determined to omit several details. I mentioned the second thief, the one who called out in backslang, but did not say that it was a child. Secondly, I did not record recognising Smiler, nor working out that he was the Tosher King, successor to his brother, Shuffler. For if I could unearth Numpty’s tosher credentials, so could Wardle.

I did, however, want Wardle to realise that Skelton was somehow caught up in the business. So I stressed the importance of the stolen clock workings, declaring as resident expert that the extraction resembled the job on the Euston Square clock. Why it had been done I did not spell out, but I recalled Pat’s amusement in describing how that first hydraulic spout was set off by a clockwork mechanism.

I also vowed to corner Worm as soon as possible.

Busy with the Exhibition, Wardle had brushed off my report. He seemed annoyed that I had used my initiative in his absence, and this latest news from Simpson was the last straw.

“What the hell is he on about?” he demanded. “Human bones? Are you telling me the thieves are mass murderers?”

I read over Simpson’s letter in a panic. “He must be able to tell us more than that.”

Wardle paced to the window, tight-lipped. “Could be grave-robbers.”

“Resurrectionists,” I said absently. “I hadn’t thought of it like that. Leaving bodies at the scene of crime. Like the spout. I told you it was linked, sir.”

He looked round sharply. “You told me nothing of the sort. What else do you know? What about this outing in the sewers?”

“I’ve been trying to find him, sir. He used to work for Bazalgette. But he’s vanished. I’ve tried every lead I can. Except…” I paused as he looked at me expectantly, enjoying for once the sense that I was one step ahead of him. “If we could find Nellie…”

His brow darkened as I spoke the name, and I sensed it: he knew where she was. All this time I’d been seeking her, he’d known and kept it secret. “Leave the girl be.”

“Sir, she could be the key–”

“He’s sworn off her, I tell you. What does she matter?”

I held up Simpson’s note. “We don’t know what he’s doing. He runs rings about us. He springs surprises all over town.”

“You think he orchestrated the thefts?”

“Perhaps. Just to show that he could. So we’d take him seriously when he threatened the Prince. You can’t shrug it off any more, sir.”

“All right,” he barked. “I should have nabbed him at the start. That won’t help us now.” He stared out into the courtyard. “Even if we could have pinned the spout on him, how would you shut him up? You couldn’t transport him quick enough. Do you see it? He’s no fly-by-night. What more had he to lose? I thought I’d leave him be. Let him run around like a wild chicken. I never expected this.”

“We have to find him, sir. If anyone can tell us where he is, it’s surely Nellie.”

“I’ll find her. Have words with her. Though, with money in her pocket, she might be anywhere now. How much Bertie’s thrown at her, I don’t know.”

“Sir, trust me, I can–”

“I said no, Watchman.” He sat down at his desk. He started to speak, hesitated, and began again. “I’m told you had a woman in here. You’re a man of surprises, Watchman.”

I stared at him, dumbfounded. “I brought a lady, sir, I confess it, who is an expert on literature and mythology and whom I am consulting about the threats.”

“Get the academics in, that’s right, seeing I made such a hash of it.”

“It was she pointed out, after our Big Ben debacle, that the beast in his tortuous lair could not be St George’s dragon, but must be the minotaur.”