The Diabolical Miss Hyde (6 page)

BOOK: The Diabolical Miss Hyde
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Everyone comes to London, desperate for a better life, and when they get here there's no work and no food and cruel
monstrous winter is always on its way, the hungry chill that never quite leaves your bones again, no matter how much rotgut gin you choke down your throat.

I walk on, and the streets get darker. Shadows and flame flicker, a single taper in a window. Guttering blue and yellow lights, glimmering from some drunken Romany conjurer's fire tricks. The stink is grotesque, crawling under my clothes to lick me like a hungry dog at a corpse.

The crowded maze of the rookery is even more crowded now. When the slum-clearers tore down a swath of tenements to build New Oxford Street, they didn't find this grubby lot aught else to live in. They just moved 'em on, jammed 'em tighter into what remained. Now they're five and six and ten to a room down here, where makeshift plank bridges lead from window to window, dank tunnels crawl beneath the streets, hidden doors lead into flash houses and slop houses and low lodging houses, where you pay a penny to scrounge a few hours' sleep on the floor or a shared bug-infested bed in a freezing airless shithole with no light. And in monstrous factories and power stations, workers inhale deadly cotton fibers, and dip matches in jaw-rotting poison, and shovel coal into hungry generators until they die.

And all in a world where they can hang you for stealing tuppence, and the price of bread's kept artificially high so the rich can get richer.
Things
matter more than people. It's enough to make you sympathize with them Frenchies chopping off their king's head and dancing around his bleeding corpse.

Heh. Nosy prickfaces like that idiot Temple should write about
this
in their fool pamphlets. Except, poor people dying slowly don't sell no papers. Never did. Never will.

I sidestep a wooden sewer trap, what looks like a sturdy cover only it's not. Step on that, and you'll fall to your death in a stinking pit. Traps like these—spring-loaded spikes, deadfalls, trip wires—are everywhere. If the crushers chase you in here, they might never come out. The Royal's fancy Enforcers, with their dumb clockwork justice? They don't dare even come here.

So everyone piles in, freaks and fortune-tellers, the fey and the fell, idiots and opium-eaters and them what's touched in the head by the
weird
. Some tell of a secret den called the Rats' Castle, a magical underground place where strange folk can go. Pish, says I. If it's real, I ain't never found it. Ain't no true fairy folk left, that's what I reckon, leastaways not in London. Years of witch-finders, greedy bounty-hunters, and plain bloody-fingered murder finished 'em off or drove 'em into hiding long ago.

But plenty of people can still claim fairy ancestors. If you've magic in your blood? The rookeries are where you hide. It's a laughing lunatic's idea of hell.

I cross Broad Street, where outside the bright-lit gin palace, an impromptu street fair is going on, a giggling riot of color. The crowd is a dirty rainbow, mismatched duds snatched from washing lines and pawnshops, the cast-off finery of dandies and high-born ladies. A mad fiddler in a crooked green top hat plays a raucous reel, competing with a bloke on a box who's hollering fine treasons about voting and workers' rights and how them bloodsuckers in the Commons don't stand for nobody nowhere.

“God save the Queen!” I yell, and a few people cheer. It ain't Her Majesty they've got a quarrel with.

Fire-eaters and sword-swallowers roam, and acrobats flip and tumble on long whippy limbs. A dwarf with a scaly face frightens passers-by for a penny with his cage of freaks. A pair of sinister carnies work an erotic shadow-play show, string puppets in silhouette behind a sheet doing all manner of dirt. On the corner, cheering folk circle around a cock-fight, and the stupid birds squawk and shed bloody feathers in clouds.

A change from the drab streets above, where everything's gray or black or cat-shit brown, and people toff about with noses held high. Here in hell, at least we know how to have a good time.

I shoulder through the smelly mass, heading for the Cockatrice public house. Ahead, a pregnant Irish girl dances drunk in the gutter, singing about Molly Malone and her wheelbarrow.
“In Dublin's fair cityy . . . where the girls are so prettyy . . .”
I join in the chorus.
“Cockles . . . and mussels . . . alive, alive-OH!”
She grins at me, sharp-toothed. Her skirts are rucked up above her bare ankles, and a long tail like a rat's curls from under the hem.

A boy runs up to me, a dirty cap pulled down between his tiny sharp horns. He tosses blue fireballs from hand to hand, making them dance. “Penny for the flame, miss?”

I toss him tuppence. He scrambles in the shit for it, and I kick aside his accomplices trying to pick my pocket while he's distracted me and walk on.

In the shadow of the brewery's red-brick tower, a carved emblem of a winged dragon with a rooster's head crows down at me from a crooked stone lintel. I push the cracked door open and step into a blast of heat, stale breath, and liquor.
Sawdust crunches under my boots. The fug rolls at eye level, cigar smoke and hashish and blacker dreams.

I spy a bloke I recognize at the bar, so I elbow my way over, kicking some lushington who gropes my behind and pushing away a drunken dolly who thinks I'm some fine Sapphic gentlewoman looking for a bit o' rough.

No thanks, sweetheart. Only one bit o' rough interests Lizzie tonight, and his name is Billy fucking Beane.

The Cockatrice is what they call a flash house, a place where criminals of all kinds congregate. Cracksmen, magsmen, coiners and fakers, card sharps and forgers, snakesmen and canaries and fencers of stolen goods. They all come here to swap information, soak their sorry arses in gin, and show off, to whatever girl or boy or blue-spotted sheep takes their fancy.

Sly little baby-raping pimps, too, like Billy the Bastard Beane, not-guilty-your-honor-if-I-say-so-meself and the new fuck-the-coppers king of Seven Dials, at least for a few hours. Hang about here long enough, I'll bet my garters you'll see Billy here tonight, deep in his cups, drinking on his newfound fame while it lasts.

I squeeze up to the bar, and a wiry, sharp-eyed cove with a lurid purple coat and tangled black hair shoves a pewter cup into my hand and splashes it with gin. “Care for a tipple, madam?”

“Don't mind if I do, Johnny.” I slap my cup against his, and gulp. Gritty fire spills down my throat and explodes, and holy Jesus, I just came alive. Eliza ain't one for the demon liquor, and she won't thank me in the morning, but sweet lord, Miss Lizzie likes a drink.

I clunk the cup down and burp, and my handsome gent pours me some more.

“Lizzie, my darlin', where have you been these dark and lonely weeks?” His words slur, and he flops a long arm around my shoulders and tosses me a glocky grin. Wild Johnny—so called because he raises hell—Johnny might act the fool, but his crooked eyes are quick, and like usual, he ain't near as plastered as he makes out. “When will you abandon your licentious ways and marry me?”

I wipe my mouth, artfully shrugging his arm off. Our Johnny's what country folk call
fey,
which is to say he's touched a bit odd. His eyes are a little too far apart, and his sharp-nailed fingers wrap further round that cup than they've any right to, and he smells uncanny sweet, of laudanum and rose petals over warm male skin. “You already got yourself a dolly, John.”

He don't seem discouraged. “Yes, it is true,” he pronounces dramatically, waving his cup in the air. “I am affy-onced, as they say on the Continent. Woe is me, my innocent heart caged like a dove by a vertible . . . a veritable shrew.”

I wink along the bar at the shrew in question. Jemima Half-Cut, Johnny's squeeze, a gangly fifteen-year-old in a buttoned blue off-the-shoulder dress and shawl. So called because she usually is, though it beats me why a tart rolling in gin should be a matter for remark around here.

Jemima scowls and gets back to work, patrolling the crowd for trade. But her eyes are exhausted, her face wan. This is her night job, after ten hours scrubbing piss-stinking linen in some moldy underground wash-house.

Stupid compassion prickles my palms, and I wipe it off on my cherry skirts. Wild Johnny of Seven Dials is a catch, so he
is, and a washer girl who sucks half a dozen cocks a night for sixpence apiece ain't got much that'll keep a man like him, if he gets another offer.

Johnny once told me he's a clergyman's son, on account of which he speaks so nice and spits on the ground whenever he walks by a churchyard. Maybe it's even true. When he was young, he went out with the swell mob, tall hat and cravat and his shock of midnight hair clipped short. But after a few seasons of fakement, the crushers get to know your face, and there ain't no point twigging yerself out as quality when the bastards in blue just cooper your lay every damn time. So now, a wise old man of twenty-one, he fences the swag, and word is there's nothing so dirty that Wild Johnny can't christen it clean.

Mayhap you're thinking I've a soft spot for him? Well, so I do. Johnny and I go way back, since I first started coming here as an angry sixteen-year-old hellcat and he were only eleven, and if I'd met him back then the way he is now? Sweet Jesus, I'd have been his dolly before he could flash those witchy eyes and say
how-d'you-like-it-darlin'?
His face is fresh and sharp, not yet rotted by phosphorous or pox-scarred to hell. He still has good teeth, what's left of 'em, and something about that mussed-on-milady's-pillow hair of his puts me in a mind to stroke it. I've a woman's heart, after all.

But I ain't playing that game, not tonight. I'm too old, too angry, too itchy inside with dark purpose to flirt with Johnny now.

I choke down another cupful. Wretched stuff, gritty like the barkeep pissed gravel in it, but it suits my mood. “I'm looking for Billy the Bastard. You seen aught of him?”

Johnny shrugs. His expression don't change. His cock-eyed smile don't slip. “What's it worth to you?”

I slide a pair of sovereigns his way along the bar. Johnny's in no need of my coin. It's just how business is done. The city's too full of snouts, and a flash gent like Johnny has a reputation to protect. Put it about that he can be bought for less than he's worth? His name'll be back in the mud before morning.

He makes the coins disappear, a swift shimmer of shadow, and scratches one oddly pointed ear. “I might have eyeballed the cove in question.”

“And?”

“It's complicated, so it is.”

“So?”

His dark eyes dance. “So kiss me and I'll tell you, sweet ruby Lizzie.”

“Tell me and I'll kiss you, you fairy-arse tosser.”

“Promise?”

“'Pon my honor.”

He nods towards the pub's rear door and flashes me that winning grin. “He's out the back, playing loo. Now pay up.”

“Complicated, is it?” I grin, too. “Johnny, you rakehell, will you deflower an innocent maiden with your tricks?”

“So I talked it up. You still owe me.”

I grab his coat lapels and plant one on him. His mouth is warm and bold, a man's mouth, and his tongue tastes of gin and sorrow. Already his hands sneak around my waist, and his deft fingers are too long, strange, intriguing . . . but I draw back and pat his cheek affectionately. “Thanks, Johnny. You're a darling.”

He blinks his wonky eyes, starry. “Sweet Jesus, I think I've gone blind.”

I laugh and walk away, smacking my lips. Eliza would be scandalized, but do I care? A good, hard, breathless lesson in scandal from a rascal like Johnny is just what that strait-laced madam needs.

Me? What I need is none of your bloody concern. Just keep your mudlark mind on Billy the Bastard.

I shoulder through the crowd, picking up my skirts to avoid puddles of gin and vomit and whatever else. Jemima Half-Cut's sitting on some old bloke's knee, his dirty hand down her bodice, and her glare follows me, green with poisoned envy.

By the gin barrels, a toothless fortune-teller with a golden earring flips pornographic tarot cards for a penny, and a moth-eaten monkey in a tiny red waistcoat scuttles down his arm to collect the coins. A group of gin-swilling students raise a noisy toast, drinks splashing. “Hail to the King!”

The King of Rats, that is. His Majesty of the fabled Rats' Castle, lord of the fey underworld, duke of the downtrodden, prince of the perennially pissed-on.

Like I says before: pish. Revolution has an ill and blood-soaked history in this country, especially lately. Ain't no one gonna come riding in like King Arthur or Boadicea to avenge us. Not even some mythical rat bloke.

I edge through to the back room, down a couple of steps to where the illicit card game is in full swing by lamplight. Seven men around a rickety table, swearing and swilling gin over a heap of coins, collateral, and crumpled banknotes. It's a vicious game, loo, and fights break out more often than not. A whiskered dwarf in a green coat tosses his hand in, cursing in thick Irish, and beside him, an impossibly tall and thin cove
with a hooked nose and a top hat hunches like a big insect on a stool and bets a fistful of silver half-crowns.

But I don't care a fig for them.

Because the ill-favored gent on the far end is Billy Beane.

Yes, it is. The Bastard, with his squashed hat, lice-ridden green coat, and skinny dog-whiskered face.

Filthy son of a sewer rat. My shiny steel darling thrums warmly against my thigh. Soon, sister. Soon.

I toss my cloak, revealing my bright skirts, and saunter in, hand on hip, twirling one curl on a saucy fingertip. I'm older than this scumbag's usual dollies, but watch and learn, because Lizzie has her ways.

I walk by Billy, trailing my hand over his shoulder. “I say, guvnor,” I purr, “ain't you Billy Beane?”

“Fuck off, tart,” growls the leprechaun.

Billy plays a queen of hearts—he's winning big tonight—and gives me the greasy eyeball. “What's it to you?”

BOOK: The Diabolical Miss Hyde
4.25Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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